Business method and apparatus for employing induced multimedia classifiers based on unified representation of features reflecting disparate modalities

ABSTRACT

This invention is a business system and method to perform categorization (classification) of multimedia items and to make business decisions based on the categorization of the item. The multimedia items are comprised of a multitude of disparate information sources, in particular, visual information and textual information. Classifiers are induced based on combining textual and visual feature vectors. Textual features are the traditional ones. Visual features include, but are not limited to, color properties of key intervals and motion properties of key intervals. The visual feature vectors are determined in such a fashion that the vectors are sparse. The text and the visual representation vectors are combined in a systematic and coherent fashion. This vector representation of a media item lends itself to well-established learning techniques and can be used for multimedia item categorization. The resulting business system, subject of this invention, can be used for many purposes. An example here are enforcement of copyright, trademark, intellectual property, parental guidance and common decency restrictions. Other uses are multimedia item classifier to determine routing of incoming items or building user profiles based on user multimedia preferences.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

The present application is related to U.S. patent application Ser. No.09/853,191, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Inducing Classifiers forMultimedia Based on Unified Representation of Features ReflectingDisparate Modalities,” by inventors R. M. Bolle, N. Haas, F. J. Oles,and T. Zhang, filed on May 10, 2001.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

This invention relates to the business of handling multimediainformation (media items), such as video and images that have audioassociated with it or possibly have text associated with it in the formof captions. More specifically, the invention relates to the business ofhandling video and audio by processing the video and audio forsupervised and unsupervised machine learning of categorizationtechniques based on disparate information sources such as visualinformation and speech transcript. The invention also relates tocombining these disparate information sources in a coherent fashion tomake business decisions.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Beyond data that can be represented in machine readable tabular formand, of course, machine readable text documents, many other forms ofmedia are transitioning to machine readable digital form. For example,visual data such as images and video are increasingly being produced indigital form or converted to digital form. Large collections andcatalogues of these media objects need to be organized, similarly tostructured text data, but using categorization technology enhanced withnew technologies that allow for convenient categorization based onvisual and audio content of the media. Such collections of media aremanaged using multimedia databases where the data that are stored arecombinations of numerical, textual, auditory and visual data.

Video is a special, peculiar type of data object in the sense that thereis a notion of time associated with this data. These types of data arereferred to as streamed information, streamed multimedia data ortemporal media. When transporting this data from one location to someother location for viewing purposes, it is important that the dataarrives in the right order and at the right time. In other words, ifframe n of a video is displayed at time t, frame n+1 has to be at theviewing location at time t plus 1/30th of a second. Of course, if themedia are moved or transported for other purposes, there is no suchrequirement.

Similarly to text documents, which can be segmented into sections,paragraphs and sentences, temporal media data can be divided up intosmaller more or less meaningful time-continuous chunks. For video data,these chunks are often referred to as scenes, segments and shots, wherea shot is the continuous depiction of space by a single camera betweenthe time the camera is switched on and switched off, i.e., it is animage of continuous space-time. In this disclosure, we refer to thesetemporal, time-continuous (but not necessarily space-continuous) chunksof media as media items. These media items include image and video, withassociated audio or text and, in general, information stream itemscomposed of disparate sources of information. Examples of media itemsare commercial segments (or groups) broadcast at regular time intervalson almost every TV channel; a single commercial is another example of amedia item or video segment.

Multimedia databases may contain collections of such temporal mediaitems in addition to non-streamed media objects such as still images andtext documents. Associated with the media items may be global textual orparametric data, such as the name of the director of the video/music(audio) or the date of recording. Categorization of these media itemsinto classes can be accomplished through supervised and unsupervisedclustering and decision tree generation based on the text and, possibly,parametric data.

Multimedia collections may also be categorized based on data content,such as the amount of green or red in images or video and soundfrequency components of audio segments. The media item collections haveto be then preprocessed and the results have to be somehow categorizedbased on the visual properties. Categorizing media items based onsemantic content, the actual meaning (subjects and objects) of the mediaitems, on the other hand, is a difficult issue. For video, speech may becategorized or recognized to some extent, but beyond that, the situationis much more complicated because of the rudimentary state of the art inmachine-interpretation of visual data.

Determining whether a given media item is equal to (a piece of) one of,or is similar to (a piece of) one of, a plurality of temporal mediaitems; or, determining whether it is equal or similar to a media item orequal or similar to a sub segment in a media item collection is anotherimportant multimedia categorization problem. A variant here is the issueof determining if a given temporal input media item contains a segmentwhich is equal or similar to one of a plurality of temporal media streamsegments or determining if the input stream contains a segment which isequal or similar to a media item in a multimedia database. To achievethis one needs to somehow compare a temporal media item to a pluralityof temporal media items or databases of such items. This problem ariseswhen certain media items need to be selected or deselected in a giventemporal media item or in a plurality of temporal media items. Anexample here is the problem of deselecting or suppressing repetitivemedia items in a television broadcast program. Such repetitive mediaitems can be commercials or commercial segments or groups which aresuppressed either by muting the sound channel or by both muting thesound channel and blanking the visual channel.

To develop a procedure for identifying media items as belonging toparticular classes or categories, (or for any classification or patternrecognition task, for that matter) supervised learning technology can bebased on decision trees, on logical rules, or on other mathematicaltechniques such as linear discriminant methods (including perceptrons,support vector machines, and related variants), nearest neighbormethods, Bayesian inference, etc. We can generically refer to the outputof such supervised learning systems as classifiers.

Supervised learning technology requires a training set consisting oflabeled data, that is, representations of previously categorized mediasegments, to enable a computer to induce patterns that allow it tocategorize hitherto unseen media segments. Generally, there is also atest set, also consisting of labeled data, that is used to evaluatewhatever specific categorization procedure is developed. In academicexercises, the test set is usually disjoint from the training set tocompensate for the phenomenon of overfitting. In practice, it may bedifficult to get large amounts of labeled data of high quality. If thelabeled data set is small, the only way to get any useful results at allmay be to use all the available data in both the training set and thetest set.

To apply standard approaches to supervised learning, the media segmentsin both the training set and the test set must be represented in termsof numbers derived from counting occurrences of features. Therelationship between features extracted for the purposes of supervisedlearning and the content of a media segment has an important impact onthe success of the enterprise, so it has to be addressed, but it is notpart of supervised learning per se.

From these feature vectors, the computer induces classifiers based onpatterns or properties that characterize when a media segment belongs toa particular category. The term “pattern” is meant to be very general.These patterns or properties may be presented as rules, which maysometimes be easily understood by a human being, or in other, lessaccessible formats, such as a weight vector and threshold used topartition a vector space with a hyperplane. Exactly what constitutes apattern or property in a classifier depends on the particular machinelearning technology employed. To use a classifier to categorize incominghitherto unseen media segments, the newly arriving data must not only beput into a format corresponding to the original format of the trainingdata, but it must then undergo a further transformation based on thelist of features extracted from the training data in the training phase,so that it finally possesses a representation as a feature vector thatpermits the presence or absence of the relevant patterns or propertiesto be determined.

The assignment of more than one category to an item is called multiplecategorization. Some supervised learning techniques (for example, a few,but not all, approaches using decision trees) do not support multiplecategorization. They make the assumption that each item categorized willbelong to at most one category, which may not be adequate in someapplications. Some supervised learning systems may return a ranked listof possibilities instead of a single category, but this is stillslightly deficient for some applications, because such a system mightassign categories even to items that should be placed in no category.What are usually most useful are those supervised learning methods thatgive realistic confidence levels with each assigned category.

The idea behind text feature selection is that the occurrence of theselected features in text associated with an unclassified data item willbe a useful ingredient for the development of an automatedclassification system designed to assign one or more categories to thedata item. For text data, the first processing step that must be done istokenization, i.e., the segmentation of a string of characters into astring of words or tokens. However, the representation of an item oftext data as a string of arbitrary words, with all of the meaningfullinguistic structures it implicitly contains, is often simply toocomplicated and rich for a computer to handle. Even if one does noparsing of the text, there may well be too many potential features, inwhich case some distillation is needed. Luckily, single words themselveshave been seen to comprise an adequate set of features for manysupervised learning problems. Sometimes it is useful to identify thepart of speech of each word, thus distinguishing between an instance ofthe verb walk and the noun walk. (This is called part-of-speechtagging.) This only scratches the surface. Modern techniques ofcomputational linguistics permit the identification of complex featuresin text, but with rising complexity comes vast numbers of features. Atany rate, after the training set is prepared, and after the textassociated with it is identified, a list of those text features deemedparticularly relevant to the particular classification task at hand isautomatically extracted. Call the features in this list the extractedtext features, and call the process of building the list text featureextraction. There is an issue in regard to whether a single list offeatures, called in this setting a global dictionary, is created orwhether there is a separate list for each category, called in thiscontext local dictionaries. The resolution of this issue can depend onthe details of the supervised learning technique employed, but, inapplications related to text, local dictionaries generally give betterperformance. There are a variety of criteria for judging relevanceduring feature extraction. A simple one is to use absolute or normalizedfrequency to compile a list of a fixed number n of the most frequentfeatures for each category, taking into account the fact that smallcategories may be so underpopulated that the total number of features inthem may be less than n. More sophisticated techniques for judgingrelevance involve the use of information-theoretic measures such asentropy or the use of statistical methods such as principal componentanalysis.

After text feature extraction, a new vector representation of each textitem associated with the training data is then extracted in terms of howfrequently each selected feature occurs in that item. The vectorrepresentation may be binary, simply indicating the presence or absenceof each feature, or it may be numeric in which each numeric value isderived from a count of the number of occurrences of each feature.

A large body of prior art of video processing for video identification,detection, categorization, and classification is concerned with thedetection of commercials in a video stream, i.e., the media item is acommercial or a sequence of commercials. This is not a categorizationproblem per se, but rather a detection problem. The detection of oneclass (or category) of interest, though, is in itself a categorizationproblem, where the categories are “category-of-interest” and “unknown.”

Many methods rely on the fact that commercials are often surrounded byblank frames, changes in audio/brightness level, simple representationsof intermediate frames and more global dynamic properties that typicallyhold for commercials. An example of a method and apparatus for detectionand identification of portions of temporal video streams containingcommercials is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,151,788 to Blum. Here, ablank frame is detected in the video stream and the video stream istested for “activity” (properties such as sound level, brightness leveland average shot length). U.S. Pat. No. 5,696,866 to Iggulden et al.extend the idea to detecting a “flat” frame. In addition to a framebeing flat at the beginning and end of a commercial, they include thatthe frame has to be silent. Additional features, such as changes in theaudio power or amplitude and changes in brightness of the luminancesignal between program and commercial segments, of the video signal areused in U.S. Pat. No. 5,343,251 to Nafeh.

Many techniques for detecting commercials, reduce commercials to a smallset of representative frames, or key frames, and then use image matchingschemes to match the key frames. Here, each particular commercial hassome representation, instead of using generic attributes above thatdescribe the category of commercials. For example, U.S. Pat. No.5,708,477 to S. J. Forbes et al. uses the notion of a list ofabbreviated frames for representing commercial video segments. Anabbreviated frame is an array of digital values representing the averageintensities of the pixels in a particular portion of the video frame.Upon detection of a scene change in the live video stream, computed andstored abbreviated frames are matched and commercial is detected andclassified (if present in memory). A technique that uses moresophisticated frame representations is presented in reference:

-   -   J. M. Sanchez, X. Binefa, J. Vitria, and P. Radeva, Local color        analysis for scene break detection applied to TV commercial        recognition, Third International Conference, Visual'99,        Amsterdam, June 1999, pp. 237–244.

(This reference is incorporated herein in its entirety.) Each commercialin the database is represented by a number of color histograms, or colorfrequency vectors, for a representative frame for each shot in thecommercial. The shot boundaries of a commercial are detected by someshot boundary detection algorithm (finding scene breaks). Commercialsare detected in a live video stream by comparing all the colorhistograms of all the commercials to the color histograms representing ashot in video stream. No temporal information is incorporated in therepresentation of the commercial.

All this prior art falls in the realm of detection of video copies. Theuse of image feature histograms, where the images are particular videoframes, like shot boundaries, have been popularized in the area of imagerecognition, and, later on in the area of image search. Color histograms(color frequency distributions) are the most widely used, in particular,the Red Green Blue (RGB) and the Hue Saturation and Intensity (HSI).Other color spaces that could be used are those defined by the CIE(Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage—the International Committeefor Illumination). These spaces are CIE L*u*v* hue angle and saturationand CIE L*a*v* hue angle and saturation. Ratios of color components suchas the red response divided by the green response (after appropriategamma correction) also yield intensity independent color measures.Another popular method is to divide each response by the averageresponse across all spectral bands, such as Rn=R/(R+G+B), to produce aset of fractional color components (which sum to one).

A particular instance of image database search, is image classification,or image content recognition. In an image classification problem,typically, the number of classes is smaller than the number of images inan image database. An example of image classification is found in:

-   -   R. Bolle, J. Connell, G. Taubin, N. Haas, R. Mohan,        “VeggieVision: A produce recognition system,” in Proc. Third        IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision, pp. 244–251,        December 1996.

This reference is incorporated herein in its entirety. Color histogramsare used in this work, but the use of color frequency distributions isextended to the use of histograms to represent other features that areused for image/object classification. Histograms are a compactrepresentation of a reference image that do not depend on the locationor orientation of the object in the image, or, at least, depend only alittle because of quantization effects. For example, visual texture is afeature used in “VeggieVision” to Bolle et al. As opposed to color,texture is a visual feature that is much more difficult to describe andto capture computationally. It is also a feature that cannot beattributed to a single pixel but rather is attributed to a patch ofimage data. The texture of an image patch is a description of thespatial brightness variation in that patch. This can be a repetitivepattern of primitives (texels), or, can be more random, i.e., structuraltextures and statistical textures. Computational texture measures areeither region-based or edge-based, trying to capture structural texturesand statistical textures, respectively. In “VeggieVision” to Bolle etal., a texture representation of an image, image class, or imagecategory, then, is a one-dimensional histogram of local texture featurevalues. Shape can also be represented in terms of frequencydistribution. The information available to work with is thetwo-dimensional boundary of (say) a segmented image. Boundary shape is afeature of multiple boundary pixels and is expressed by a localcomputational feature, for example, curvature. Local curvature isestimated by fitting a circle at each point of the boundary. Aftersmoothing, this boundary shape feature is quantized and a histogram iscomputed. Instead of over an area, such as for color histograms, thesehistograms are computed from a collection of image pixels that form theboundary of the object image. Finally, size of image segments is anotherfeature of the images that is important in “VeggieVision” to Bolle etal. A method that computes area from many collections of three boundarypoints is proposed. Three points determine a circle and, hence, adiameter D. A histogram of these diameter estimates is then used as arepresentation for objects (in the image) size.

Many video copy detection solutions use some spatial representation offrames or images (spatial representations as described above) and sometemporal representation of the times between the frames, i.e., aspatial-temporal representation. Indyk et al. have proposed a method forvideo copy detection, solely using the distance (time) between shotbreaks in the video as the feature of the video.

-   -   P. Indyk, G. Iyengar and N. Shivakumar, Finding pirated video        sequences on the Internet. tech. rep., Stanford Infolab,        February 1999.

This method (incorporated herein by reference) is somewhat limited inthe richness of the representation. Other video copy detectionalgorithms use some form of image matching (visual data) combined withtemporal evidence integration. A method for detecting arbitrary videosequences, including commercials, is described in (incorporated hereinby reference):

-   -   R. Mohan, “Video Sequence Matching”, International Conference on        Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, (ICASSP), May 1998.

Mohan defines that there is a match between a given video sequence andsome segment of a database video sequence if each frame in the givensequence matches the corresponding frame in the database video segment.That is, the matching sequences are of the same temporal length;matching slow-motion sequences is performed by temporal sub-sampling ofthe database segments. The representation of a video segment is a vectorof representations of the constituent frames in the form of an ordinalmeasure of a reduced intensity image of each frame. Before matching, thedatabase is prepared for video sequence by computing the ordinal measurefor each frame in each video segment in the database. Finding a matchbetween some given action video sequence and the databases then amountsto sequentially matching the input sequence against each sub-sequence inthe database and detecting minimums. This method introduces the temporalaspects of the video media items.

All these color-based image methods are subject to digitizing andencoding artifacts, like color variations. See A. Hampapur and R. M.Bolle, Feature based Indexing for Media Tracking. In Proc. of Int. Conf.on Multimedia and Expo, August 2000, pp. 67–70 (Hampapur et al.). Tocircumvent color variations Hampapur et al. have, instead, used otherfeatures that are invariant to color variations. In a first, off-lineindexing phase representations for a set of known reference media itemsare computed and stored in an index structure. For each segment, a setof intervals is determined and from each key interval, a set of featurevalues is extracted from portions of the video frames. The values arequantized and index tables are built where feature values point to thereference media items. In the search and detection phase, a real-timeprocess of computing and quantizing features from a target media streamis done in the same fashion. Additionally, counters are initialized foreach of the known media items. When computed feature values point to aknown media item, the corresponding counter is incremented. High valuesof the counter indicate the presence of a known media item in the targetstream. An interesting thing to note here is that any feature type, suchas, color, edges or motion, can be used in this method. Further,features are not computed on a frame basis (as in the above methods) butrather from regions within the frame and even regions of consecutiveframes (local optical) flow. Detecting media items is furtheraccomplished with a computational complexity that is sub-linear.

Reference Hampapur et al. is incorporated herein by reference.

What all these above mentioned references have in common is that thevisual features extracted from the video do not have a whole lot ofsemantic meaning, e.g., a color, in and of itself, does not say muchabout the semantic content of the image or video. See Lienhart, C.Kuhmunch and W. Effelsberg, “On the detection and recognition oftelevision commercials.” In Proc. of the IEEE Conf. on MultimediaComputing and Systems, 1997 (Lienhart et al.). Lienhart et al. takethings a step further. They describe a system for performing bothfeature based detection and recognition of known commercials. The visualfeatures that are used have spatial-temporal aspects. They use directlymeasurable features, such as, a spot being no longer than 30 seconds,spots being separated by a short break of 5–12 monochrome frames, andthe volume of the audio signal being turned up. In addition, they useindirectly measurable features, like the fact that spots are full ofmotion, animated, and full of action. In addition, commercial spots havemany still frames and many of them contain textual information. It isimportant to note that these are the beginnings of image processingtechniques for extracting semantic information, such as action andmotion, from video frames.

Reference Lienhart et al. is incorporated herein by reference.

Now consider B-T Truong, S. Venkatesh and C. Dorai, “Automatic GenreIdentification for Content-Based Categorization,” in Proc. Int. Conf. OnPattern Recognition, September 2000, pp. 230–233 (B-T Truong et al.),incorporated herein in its entirety. The authors take the use ofextracted semantic features a step further. The extracted visualfeatures have cinematographic meaning, such as, fades, dissolves andmotion features. Motion features are incorporated in terms of “quiet”visual scenes (the absence of motion) and “motion runs,” unbrokensequences of motion, where motion is defined in terms of luminancedifferences between frames. In addition, the authors use color featuresin terms of color coherence over time, high brightness and highsaturation. The authors used the well-known C4.5 decision tree inductionprogram to build a classifier for genre labeling.

Another technique for video categorization is described in

-   -   N. Dimitrova, L. Agnihotri and G. Wei, “Video classification        based on HMM using text and faces,” (Dimitrova et al.).

Herein, first fifteen labels defined based on these visual features (bytext, the authors, mean superimposed text in the video) are defined,examples are “talking head” and “one text line.” A technique usingHidden Markov models (HMM) is described to classify a given media iteminto predefined categories, namely, commercial, news, sitcom and soap.An HMM takes these labels as input and has observation symbols asoutput. The system consists of two phases, a training and aclassification stage. Reference Dimitrova et al. is incorporated hereinin its entirety.

It is important to note that Dimitrova et al. does not use text inmachine (ASCII) readable form, it uses the presence or absence of textblock(s) in the video frames.

On the other hand, such machine-readable ASCII text, along with, visualfeatures is used for video categorization in M. A. Smith and T. Kanade,“Video skimming for quick browsing based on audio and imagecharacterization,” Carnegie Mellon University, Tech. Rep. CMU-CS-95-186,June 1995 (Smith et al.).

Reference Smith et al. is incorporated herein in its entirety. Asophisticated video database browsing systems is described, the authorsrefer to browsing as “skimming.” Much emphasis is placed on visualanalysis for video interpretation and video summarization (theconstruction of two-dimensional depictions of the video to allow fornonlinear access). Visual analysis include scene break detection, cameramotion analysis, and object detection (faces and superimposed text). Theaudio transcript is used to identify keywords in it. Term frequencyinverse document frequency techniques are used to identify criticalwords. Words that appear frequently in a particular video segment butoccur infrequently in standard corpuses receive the highest weight. InSmith et al. the speech recognition is not automated yet, andclosed-captioning is used instead. Video search is accomplished throughthe use of the extracted words as search keys, browsing of videosummaries then allows for quickly finding the video of interest.

A content-based video browsing system that applies linguistic analysisto the closed captioning is described in I. Mani, D. House, M. Maybury,M. Green, “Towards content-based browsing of broadcast news video,” inIntelligent Multimedia Info Retrieval, Issue 1997, M. T. Maybury (ed.),pp 241–258. AAAI Press/The MIT Press (Mani et al.).

The reference Mani et al. is incorporated herein in its entirety.

Emphasis in Mani et al. is placed on topic and story segmentation.Assuming that one could associate terms in a document with subjects in athesaurus, the authors hypothesize that as topics change, the associatedthesaural subjects change as well. The work is based on a thesaurus of124 subject categories, with text summaries represented in a124-dimensional space. Well-known subject similarity measures as theangle between subject vectors are used. The issue then is detecting achange in topic by detecting a change in angle. The subject vector,however, has to be computed over a certain video time interval, theauthors refer to this as a block. The block size is important here. Theauthors do not arrive at a universally usable block size and contemplateadjustable block size. Further, the authors consider the use of cuesthat closed-captioners insert, in particular “>>” indicates a change ofspeaker, while “>>>” indicates a change in topic. These cues were foundto be unreliable. Therefore, the authors investigate the use of whatthey call “sign off” cues. These are specific textual cues that indicatea change in topic, as “Goodnight Jim” in the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHourshown in the past on PBS. The authors use no visual cues to detect storyboundaries.

Finally, the use of automated speech recognition of the audio track todetermine story and topic is being used more and more since speechrecognition technology is steadily improving. The use of automatedspeech recognition can be classified as (1) dictation applications, (2)conversational or transactional applications, and (3) indexingapplications. A comprehensive and excellent overview of the latterapplication is presented in Coden et al.:

-   -   A. R. Coden, E. W. Brown, “Speech Transcript Analysis for        Automatic Search,” IBM Research Tech. Rep., IBM Research Tech.        Rep., (Coden et al.).

This reference (Coden et al.) is incorporated herein by reference. Allof the video indexing, video summarization, video segmentation, andvideo categorization and subject detection technologies based onautomated speech recognition, described in Coden et al., use no or verylittle visual information.

There is also quite some prior art dealing with segmenting documents(discourse) into portions corresponding to topics. This is typicallyreferred to as “discourse segmentation” to distinguish it from charactersegmentation from image or video for optical character recognition(OCR). The term “discourse,” further is more general because it includesspoken language, which is transcribed from wave forms to text (e.g.,ASCII) for analysis purposes. In the following discussion, we will usethe terms interchangeably.

One popular recurring idea is to partition the discourse into fragments,and to measure the “similarity” of one fragment to another, using thecosine metric, which is the dot product of the word occurrencefrequencies. (Morphological analysis is usually employed first, toreduce inflected, declined, etc., words to their base forms—“stemming”or “lemmatization”).

Reference Hearst, M. A., Multi-paragraph segmentation of expositorytext. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association forComputational Linguistics, Las Cruces, N.Mex., 1994, pp. 9–16. (Hearst),is incorporated herein by reference.

Hearst does this by partitioning the entire document into tiles of moreor less uniform size, the size being on the order of a paragraph. Shethen plots C (j, j+1) versus j, for j=1, . . . , N−1, where N is thenumber of tiles in the document, and C is the inter-tile co-occurrence(or similarity) coefficient. After smoothing of this curve, localminimal values indicate discourse boundaries, since minimal similarityindicates probable different topics of the tiles.

Also incorporated by reference is J. C. Reynar, “An automated method offinding topic boundaries,” Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference ofthe Association for Computational Linguistics, student session, LasCruces, N.Mex., 1994, pp. 331–333, (Reynar). Reynar divides a discourseat a very fine grain: the individual word. He then records thecorrespondences (0 or 1) with every other word in an N×N matrix, where Nis the document size in words. Then any choice of discourse boundariesdefines a set of square sub-matrices of the matrix lying along the maindiagonal, each sub-matrix representing the intra-segment co-occurrencevalues. Reynar defines the best discourse segmentation to be the onethat minimizes the density of 1's in the extra-segmental co-occurrenceregions of the matrix. Here the extra-segmental regions are all matrixentries not lying in the intra-segmental sub-matrices. He calls histechnique dotplotting.

Further references Ponte and Croft, and Kozima are incorporated hereinby reference:

-   Ponte J. M. and Croft W. B. 1997, Text Segmentation by Topic, in    Proceedings of the First European Conference on Research and    Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, pp. 120–129. (Ponte and    Croft)-   Kozima, H. 1993 Text Segmentation based on similarity between words.    In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Association for    Computational Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio. pp. 286–288, (Kozima)

Ponte and Croft, use a similar technique, except that they “expand” eachword in a partition by looking it up in a “thesaurus” and taking all ofthe words in the same concept group that the seed word was in. (This isan attempt to overcome co-ocurrence, or correspondence, failures due tothe use of synonyms or hypernyms, when really the same underlyingconcept is being referenced.) Ponte and Croft bootstrap thecorrespondences by developing a document-specific thesaurus, using“local context analysis” of labeled documents. Then, to find the bestco-occurence sub-matrices, instead of exhaustively considering allpossibilities, they use a dynamic programming technique, minimizing acost function. Kozima et al. perform a similar word “expansion,” bymeans of “spreading activation” in a linguistic semantic net. Two wordsare considered to be co-occurrences of, or corresponding to, each otherif and only if each can be reached from the other by less than m stepsin the semantic net, for some arbitrarily chosen value of m.

There are feature-based approaches, too, that do not rely on wordco-occurrence or correspondences, for example, Litman and Passoneau.Here a set of word features is developed. These features are derivedfrom multiple knowledge sources: prosodic features, cue phrase features,noun phrase features, combined features. A decision tree, expressed interms of these features, is then evaluated at each potential discoursesegment boundary to decide if it is truly a discourse segmentation pointor not. The decision expression can be hand-crafted or automaticallyproduced by feeding training data to a learning system such as thewell-known C4.5 decision tree classification scheme

Reference [Litman D. J. and Passoneau R. J. 1995. Combining multipleknowledge sources for discourse segmentation. In Proceedings of the 33rdAnnual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics,Cambridge, Mass.], (Litman and Passoneau), is incorporated herein byreference.

Now consider [D. Beeferman, A. Berger and J. Lafferty, Text SegmentationUsing Exponential Models, CMU Tech Rep], (Beeferman, et al.) that isincorporated herein by reference and introduces a feature-baseddiscourse segmentation technique for documents. The idea is to assign toeach position in the data stream a probability that a discourse boundaryoccurs. Central to the approach is a pair of tools: a short- and along-range model of language. The short-term model is a trigram model,the conditional probability of a word based on the two preceding words.The long-term model is obtained by retaining a cache of recently seentrigrams. Determining a discourse boundary in statistical terms is castby formulating the probability of a boundary both in terms of the short-and the long-term model. Maximal values of this probability thenindicate discourse boundaries. Beeferman et al. touch upon, but do notimplement, multimedia document (containing audio, text and video)discourse segmentation. Examples of short- long-term features that theypropose are: “is there a sharp change in video stream in the last 20frames,” “is there, a blank video frame nearby,” and “is the a matchbetween the spectrum of the current image and the spectrum of the imagenear the last segment boundary.”

In sum, we can (roughly) distinguish the following approaches to mediaitem categorization and media item subject detection; or, moregenerally, media item classification. The approaches are classifiedbased on the features that are used. The features are derived from theraw analog signal, visual features computed from digitized media itemsframes (images), textual features directly decoded from theclosed-caption, and textual features obtained from automaticallycomputed speech transcripts. Here is a list of common kinds of featuresused to classify multimedia items:

-   -   Raw analog visual and audio signals.    -   Visual features computed from individual frames.    -   Visual features computed from individual frames plus temporal        features.    -   Visual features computed from individual frames, temporal        features plus audio features.    -   Semantic visual features computed from individual frames plus        temporal features.    -   Semantic visual features computed from multiple frames and        temporal features.    -   Closed-captioning (predetermined keyword spotting) plus visual        features.    -   Speech transcript (predetermined keyword spotting) plus visual        features.    -   Using only textual data, either speech transcript or        closed-captioning.    -   Speech transcript computed from audio track.    -   Speech transcript computed from audio track plus rudimentary        visual features.    -   Text document analysis.

PROBLEMS WITH THE PRIOR ART

Some of the problems with the prior art are now presented.

-   1. The prior art media item categorization techniques for business    decisions are based either only on visual information or only on    textual information.-   2. The media item representations are not designed to handle both    textual and visual features that can be extracted from media items.    This inherently limits the number of media items that can be    distinguished, i.e., the discrimination power of the representations    will not extend beyond a certain (not very large) number of    different video categories and the number of business decisions,    consequently, is then smaller because of prior art limitations.-   3. The media item representations are not designed to handle in a    coherent fashion both textual and visual features that can be    extracted from media items and hence business decisions cannot be    made in a coherent fashion.

OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION

An object of this invention is an improved business system and methodfor categorizing multimedia items.

An object of this invention is an improved business system and methodfor categorizing multimedia items using both textual and visualfeatures.

An object of this invention is an improved business system and methodfor categorizing multimedia items while handling both textual and visualfeatures coherently.

An object of this invention is a business system for performingcategorizing of multimedia items in a large number of categories(classes).

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates to business processes based on acategorization methodology for categorizing multimedia items. Examplesinclude video and images with captions. There are two phases: a learningphase, whose purpose is to induce a classifier, and categorizationphase, in which the classifier may be applied in business processes.

In the learning phase, off-line supervised or unsupervised learning,using a training set of labeled or unlabeled multimedia items asappropriate, is employed to induce a classifier based on patterns foundin a unified representation as a single feature vector of disparatekinds of features, linguistic and visual, found in a media item underconsideration. The unified representation of disparate features in asingle feature vector will enable a classifier to make use of morecomplicated patterns for categorization, patterns that simultaneouslyinvolve linguistic and visual aspects of the media, resulting insuperior performance as compared with other less sophisticatedtechniques. This allows for better designed and more precisilyperforming business processes. First, for each media item, theaccompanying text is represented by a sparse textual feature vector.Secondly, for each media item, a set of key frames or key intervals (keyintervals, for short) is determined, which can either be regularlysampled in time or based on the information content. From each keyinterval, a set of features is extracted from a number of regions in thekey intervals. These regions can be different for each feature. Theextracted features are coarsely quantized. Hence, each key interval isencoded by a sparse textual feature vector and a sparse visual featurevector. The sparse textual feature vectors and the sparse visual featurevectors may optionally need to be further transformed to assure theircompatibility in various ways, such as (1) with respect to range of thevalues appearing in the two kinds of vectors or (2) with respect to thecompetitive sizes of the two kinds of vectors with respect to some normor measure. The textual feature vector and the visual feature vector arecombined by concatenation to produce a unified representation in asingle vector of disparate kinds of features. Having created the unifiedrepresentation of the training data, standard methods of classifierinduction are then used, followed by appropriate business processes andbusiness decisions.

In categorization phase, the process of computing sparse textual featurevectors and sparse visual feature vectors for a media item is repeated.The classifier induced in the learning phase is used to identify theclass (category) of a media item and appropriate business processes andbusiness decisions might also be learned.

A standard method of classifier induction is the construction of ak-nearest-neighbor classifier based on training data whose elements arelabeled with the classes to which they belong. A k-nearest-neighborclassifier is one that classifies vectors using some measure ofsimilarity. It assigns to a vector whose class is unknown the class towhich a majority of its k nearest neighbors in the training data belong.The simplest kind of a k-nearest-neighbor classifier is one in which kis taken to be 1. The categorization phase for this simplest kind ofk-nearest-neighbor classifier amounts to, for an item whose class isunknown, finding its nearest neighbor, which is the most similar item inthe training data to that item according to a similarity measure, andassigning to the unknown item the class of its nearest neighbor. Thisinvention explicitly includes the use of these fairly simple classifiers(as well as their more complex classifiers, such as support vectormachines and various classifiers based on statistical analysis of thevectors representing the training data) among the standard methods ofclassifier induction to which reference was made above. In particular,this invention includes the solution of the problem of finding the mediaitem in a reference collection that is most similar to a hithertounconsidered media item by ascertaining the degree of similarity betweenthe vector representations of the hitherto unconsidered media item andeach reference media item, as long as the vector representations thatare compared are constructed as described above, thereby providing aunified representation of disparate modalities of the media items beingcompared. Based on the multimedia item(s) further appropriate businessprocesses and business decisions can be applied.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURES

The foregoing and other objects, aspects and advantages will be betterunderstood from the following non limiting detailed description ofpreferred embodiments of the invention with reference to the drawingsthat include the following:

FIG. 1 is a prior art block diagram of the state-of-the-artcategorization technology for document categorization.

FIG. 2 is a flowchart showing the disparate sources of information thatare used for media item categorization

FIG. 3 is a more specific flowchart describing the combined computationof the disparate sources of information from a media item.

FIG. 4 is a detailed flowchart for inducing classifiers for categorizingmedia items that comprise of disparate sources of information.

FIG. 5 is an example of a decision rule induced by the trainingprocesses that combines visual and textual information.

FIG. 6A is a block diagram of the learning/training phase of onepreferred system embodying the present invention.

FIG. 6B is a block diagram of the classification phase of one preferredsystem embodying the present invention.

FIG. 7A is a flowchart of the visual feature extraction process formedia items, where first media item regions are selected and then thedata within the regions is transformed.

FIG. 7B is a flow chart of a visual feature extraction process for mediaitems, where first the media item is transformed and then regions in thefeature domain are selected.

FIG. 8 is a sketch of an media item frame with two arbitrary regionsfrom which the features are computed.

FIG. 9 is a video frame where the regions are rectangular windows(regions).

FIG. 9A is an example video frame with rectangular regions that show thedata that is used for feature computation.

FIG. 10 shows a flow diagram of a video transformation where the regionsspan one or more frames and the media item visual feature is opticalflow.

FIG. 11A is an example flow diagram of visual hue feature computationfor a key frame with rectangular windows.

FIG. 11B gives an example quantization of hue space to define visual huecodes.

FIG. 12 is a flowchart of the visual feature vector computation from thevisual part of the media item.

FIG. 13A shows a method for computing visual feature vectors from thevisual part of the media item where both temporal and spatial propertiesof the media item are preserved.

FIG. 13B shows a method for computing visual feature vectors from thevisual part of the media item where only the temporal properties of themedia item are preserved.

FIG. 13C shows a method for computing visual feature vectors from thevisual part of the media item where only the spatial properties of themedia item are preserved.

FIG. 13D shows a preferred specific method for computing visual featurevectors from the visual part of the media item where the key intervalsof the media item are ordered based on one or more features of the keyintervals.

FIG. 14A is a flowchart of the process for computing a first visualfeature vector in FIG. 13D.

FIG. 14B is a flowchart of the process of shortening the first visualfeature vector to a standard length vector in FIG. 13D.

FIG. 15 shows the process of combining visual and textual featurevectors to obtain a vector representing the disparate sources ofinformation in the media item.

FIG. 16 is a detailed system block diagram of the categorization system,illustrating how different formats of media items are handled in thecategorization process.

FIG. 17 introduces the idea of associating a feature vector with acontinuous portion of the media item as opposed to associating thefeature vector with the entire media item.

FIG. 18 is a flowchart of a system that uses the media item classifierfor segmenting a temporal media item into contiguous segments, whereeach segment is of one or more categories.

FIG. 19 is a one-dimensional depiction of the categorization as afunction of time function that points out problems with temporal mediaitem categorization.

FIG. 20A gives heuristic aggregation rules based on category boundaries.

FIG. 20B gives heuristic aggregation rules based on category regions.

FIG. 21A is an instance of the flowchart of FIG. 18 where the optimalcategory aggregation is determined by optimizing a cost function.

FIG. 21B is a system for learning aggregation rules based on labeledtraining data and optional heuristic rules.

FIG. 22 shows two examples of a lowest-cost interpretation rules and theapplication of the rules to a short sequence of categories.

FIG. 23 is a business method for determining profiles of thosemultimedia item categories of particular interest to various differentusers retrieving multimedia content from a private and/or publicnetwork.

FIG. 24A is a business application of the multimedia item categorizerfor building index tables to organize a multimedia item data base interms of categories or indices.

FIG. 24B is a business application for retrieving of multimedia itemsfrom database based on the database organization and database indexingdescribed in FIG. 24A.

FIG. 25 is a business application where one or more of multimedia itemsare received and the items are routed according to the multimedia itemscategories.

FIG. 26 is a business application where one or more multimedia items arereceived and for each item a decision based on the category of themultimedia item is made.

FIG. 27 is a business application where one or more multimedia items ona private and/or public network are examined and for each foundmultimedia item a decision based on the category of the multimedia itemis made.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

This system categorizing media items has two distinct aspects. The firstaspect is called the training phase which builds representations of thereference media items; the second phase is called the categorizationphase, where instances media items are categorized. The training phaseis an off-line process that involves processing of the reference mediaitems to form a set of one or more categories. The categorization phaseclassifies a media item in a collection of such items by processing themedia item to extract audio and visual features and using the media itemclass representations.

FIG. 1 shows a prior art flowchart for a system 100 for categorizingtext documents. In step 110, a set of text documents is input to thesystem. Each text document is labeled as belong to a class S=c₁, i=1, .. . , C. The classes S can be hierarchical, in the sense that each classS, can be recursively divided up into a number of subclasses,S=S_(subclass1), S_(subclass2), . . . , S_(subclassN). In 120 a singlevector is computing representing the text in each document in D. Such avector V is a large-dimensional vector with entry n equal to 1 or 0,respectively, if word n is present, or not, in the document; or, such avector V can be a large-dimensional vector with entry n equal to f wheref is the number of times word n is present in the document. Examples ofsource of text vectors 120 include: close captions, open captions,captions, speech recognition applied to one or more audio input,semantic meanings derived from one or more audio streams, and globaltext information associated with the media item. In step 130 (FIG. 1)each vector V is labeled the same as the corresponding document. Step140 induces machine-learned classification methods for classifyingunseen vectors V representing new unclassified documents. Finally, Box150, infers classification method to classify (categorize) unknowndocuments D, represented by feature vectors V.

FIG. 2 shows a diagram of the various disparate input sources to thecategorization process. The general multimedia input sources is mediaitem 200. This input source consists of audio 210, text documents 220and visual input 230. Using the audio input, a speech transcript incomputed (240) applying well-known techniques in the prior art.Possibly, if needed and available, a closed- or open-captioning (220) ofthe visual footage (230) is used to generate textual features 120 (verymuch in line with step 120 in FIG. 1). Thirdly, the visual track 230 istransformed into characteristic visual feature spaces (250). The currentinvention puts these disparate sources of information, i.e., speechtranscript representation 240, closed-caption representation (generaltextual features) 120, and visual features transformed intocharacteristic spaces 250 together in a unified framework. Thisframework allows the treatment of these sources of information in acoherent fashion.

FIG. 3 shows a more specific way of processing the multimedia media itemfor categorization purposes. The input data, media item (300), isprocessed separately in terms of the visual track, 305, and the audiotrack, 310. The visual track 305 and the audio track are processedindependently and concurrently. From the visual track (305),characteristic key frames or key intervals are selected 320. Thesecharacteristic pieces of video are transformed into characteristicvisual spaces 330 that in some way characterize the video clip in termsof visual features associated with the video categories. These visualspace representations are transformed into sparse visual feature vectors(335). The audio track 310 is automatically transcribed into a preciseas possible transcript. Additionally, possible available closed- andopen-captioning is included in the textual description of the media item300. In 360 the textual content associated with the current media item330 is tokenized (i.e., the sequence of characters in the text isdivided into words and other meaningful tokens) and, optionally, stemmed(i.e., tokens are replaced by standard forms, roots, or morphologicalstems in order to reduce the size of the feature space ultimatelyconstructed, such as replacing the word cats by cat, the word men byman, the work came by come, etc. Step 365 computes a textualrepresentation vector of the current media item 300 under consideration.In output 370, a collective coherent textual and visual representationof the media item is accomplished established. An out put vector 380 isthe result of this process.

FIG. 4, flowchart 400, shows, when supervised learning is employed, thecomplete integration of disparate media modules in the learning phase,i.e., the induction from labeled data of a classifier whose purpose ismedia item categorization. In the initial step 410, the system acceptsas input a data set D consisting of media items, each labeled asbelonging to 0 or more classes from a set or hierarchy of classes S.Steps 420 and 430 may be permuted or carried out simultaneously. In 420,the system constructs a single vector representation of text featuresand/or audio features extracted or associated with each media item in D.These features may be present in a transcript produced by voicerecognition software, in close-captioned text, or in open-captionedtext. Some features may indicate the presence of or the character,appropriately quantized, of other audible characteristics of the mediasegment, such as music, silence, and loud noises. In 430, the systemconstructs a single vector representation of the visual featuresextracted or associated with each media item in D. In 440, for eachlabeled media item in the data set D, the system constructs a trainingset T(D) by combining the two vector representations of that mediasegment (constructed in 420 and 430) into a single composite featurevector, with the resulting vector labeled by the same set of classesused to label the media item. Optionally, in 440, before combining thevector representations, the system may uniformly transform one or bothof those set of representations in order to assure compatibility. Amongthe ways that incompatibility may arise may be (1) a marked differencein the number of values that may appear as components of the vectors and(2) a marked difference in the norms or sizes of the vectors present inthe two sets. The exact criterion for what constitutes a markeddifference between to the sets of vectors will depend in practice on theparticular technique of supervised learning being employed, and it mayidiosyncratically depend on the data set D. Thus, in practice, thecriterion may be experimentally determined by the evaluation ofdifferent classifiers induced under different assumptions. At any rate,in 440, the system ultimately produces, normally by concatenation of the(possibly transformed) feature vectors produced in 420 and 430, acomposite labeled feature vector is ultimately produced for each mediaitem in D. In 450, the system uses a supervised learning technique—awide variety of them exist—with T(D) as training data to induce aclassifier that can be used to assign classes in S to a hitherto unseenfeature vector with the same structure as those in T(D). In 460, thesystem outputs the classifier induced in 450, as well as any parameters,information or settings needed to represent hitherto unseen media itemsas unified feature vectors with exactly the same format and structure asthose in T(D), so that the classifier induced in 450 can be legitimatelyapplied to those vectors.

FIG. 5 shows a typical example of video classification rules derivedfrom disparate information sources such as the visual and audio track.These sources are visual, 510 and 516, and auditory, 512 and 514. In thespeech track the words “golf” and “grass” (512 & 514) are detected. Thecombination of these two words point 520 point to the fact that we aredealing with a piece of video footage of category sports 525, with thesubject golf 530. However, the visual circumstances in the topic of golf510, where the actual game of golf is played, and a relatively staticscene 516 of a “talking head” indicating a golf interview. Items 510 and520 together infer that the medium items has category “sports” 545 withsubject “golf game” 548. On the other hand, when the footage isrelatively static, 516, it is clear that the category of the footage issports again “555” but that the subjects is an interview about golf“558.”

FIG. 6 shows a block diagram of the system architecture. The top portion(FIG. 6A) shows the supervised/unsupervised phase 610, i.e., the part ofthe system that handles the computation of classes and learns arepresentation (i.e., class/category representations 675) of thereference media items 610. The learning is achieved through trainingengine 620, which computes the class representations 675. The bottomportion (FIG. 6B) shows the classification/categorization phase 615using the classification/categorization engine 650. Here features arecomputed from the target incoming medium item M 660. The class/categoryof medium item 660 is reported to 685. Each of these phases is describedin detail below.

The training phase, as shown in FIG. 6A, includes the key frame or keyinterval (hereafter referred to as key interval) selection step, thevisual feature generation step, and the visual feature vector populationstep. Each of these steps is discussed below.

Visual features 775 are computed from key intervals. Two methods forvisual feature computation are described in FIGS. 7A and 7B. The mediaitem 750 in this case has a time dimension 755. Characteristic keyframes, e.g., a frame a t₀ 760, or characteristic key intervals 770 areselected. A key interval could be a window [delta_(t1), delta_(t2)]around frame a t₀ 760. So far, the methods described in FIGS. 7A and 7Bare the same. Key intervals 770 or key frames 760 are also selected inthe same fashion for both methods. These key frames or intervals couldbe in the middle of shots, they could be at the beginning and end ofshots, or the could be equally spaced over the shots. Alternatively, thekey intervals can be selected based on visual properties of the mediaitem, such as, temporal regions of minimal motion or temporal regions ofmaximal motion.

In FIG. 7A, the visual feature computation 705 proceeds as follows.Given the key frame or key interval 770, this interval is quantized intoregions in step 706. In step 707, the data in each region aretransformed into a different feature space. (Such a transformationcould, for example, be visual flow computation for each region.)Following this, in step 708, region features are computed. (In thevisual flow example this could be average flow in a region.) The visualfeatures 775 are output of visual feature computation process 705. InFIG. 7A, the visual feature computation 705 proceeds differently. Now,in step 717 first the data in the key frame or key interval istransformed into a different feature space. (Such a transformationcould, for instance, be a Fourier transform.) In step 716, the values ofthis transformation are regarded as a domain and this domain isquantized into regions. (If the transformation is the Fourier transform,the domain is the frequency spectrum.) For each of the regions in thatdomain, in step 708, region features are computed. The visual features775 are output of visual feature computation process 705. The visualfeatures are coarsely quantized into codes (see, for example, FIG. 11B)and these codes are used to populate feature vectors as in FIG. 13.

The feature transformation and feature extraction steps are dependent onthe type of similarity to be measured. For example, image color basedcoding processes have been discussed in Smith et al. There are severalother techniques of media transformation and feature computation thatare well known in the art. See Smith and Chang, Tools and Techniques forColor Image Retrieval, In IS&T/SPIE Proc Vol. 2670, Storage andRetrieval for Image and Video Databases.

The feature-based vector generation process is applied to all the keyintervals selected by the key-framing process. The media item M in FIGS.7A and B is depicted by a horizontal rectangle 750.

Time running from time 0 to time T seconds is indicated by the time axis755. A key frame is selected at time is t₀ (760) or, alternatively, akey interval (770) is selected between times delta_(t1) and delta_(t2).

In general, the visual feature computation is comprised of a number ofsteps. The complexity of each of the steps is dependent on the featurebeing considered. In this invention, for media items we describe in moreor less detail two visual features, namely, image color-based codes andoptical flow-based codes. As indicated above, this feature codegeneration process, that generates feature values 775, is comprised oftwo steps, namely, the step where features are extracted 705 and aquantization or code generation step as in FIG. 13. Each of these stepsis discussed below.

Referring again to FIGS. 7A and B, in the feature vector computationstep 705, the data in the key intervals are processed to extractdifferent types of measurements or visual features. These measurementsmay be based on both global and local spatial or spatio-temporalproperties of a key interval. These measurements may also be extractedfrom predetermined portions (regions) of the key intervals.

For example, in FIG. 8 a part of a media item 810 (e.g., key interval)is shown with two arbitrary shaped regions, 820 and 830, region (1) andregion (2), respectively. Only from the visual data in these regions,the feature values 775 for (say) feature F_(j) are computed. Theregions, 820 . . . 830, here can cover the complete key interval and theregions can differ the features F_(j), j=1, 2, . . . that are used. Eachfeature F_(j) may have different regions W_(j) and a different number ofthese local regions.

FIG. 9 shows an example where the media item key frames 900 for featureF_(j) are divided up into 16 rectangular windows (regions) 901, 902, . .. , 903, . . . , 904 (the local regions). Other windowing schemes areeasily contemplated by persons skilled in the art.

FIG. 9A gives an example of a video frame 950 (part of the media item)with the window structure 901, 902, . . . , 903, . . . , 904 (as in FIG.9) overlaid. Each window 960 contains data which is used for visualfeature vector computation; the media transformation 705 would use datain the whole frame 950. In the case where the domain regions arewindows, with w₁ windows horizontally and w₂ windows vertically we haveW_(j)=w₁×w₂ regions. The media item region selection (706) for eachvisual feature j which has W_(j) quantized elements. These features arethen stored in feature vector 755.

Referring to FIG. 7A, media regions are selected 706 every time t₀(760), i.e., a key interval, is encountered. Each feature F_(j), j=1, .. . , m is computed from the data in the appropriate regions for hedifferent features F_(j). The region transformation 707 depicts thetransformation of media into feature space, such features can be colorspace transformation, edge detection, optical flow, etc. In general, theresulting feature values are not directly used as input to the featurerange quantization step (715). Rather, an intermediate transform 708 isapplied that maps the features obtained by region transformation 707into a smaller number of feature values for each F_(j), j=1, . . . , m.An example is to compute the average hue for the regions 901, 902, . . ., 903, . . . , 904 in FIG. 9. Or, it maps a number of high-contrast edgeelement located in the form of video text into the coordinates of thewindow that contains the edge elements. In essence, the transformation708 is a data reduction step so that the vector representations for themedia items S=s₁, . . . , s_(n) are as sparse as possible and yet thereference streams can still be distinguished.

Referring to FIG. 7B, it is alternatively possible that all the data inthe key interval can be transformed through a media item transform 717into a feature space G. Hence, a mapping 717 is performed of all thedata in a key interval into a feature space G. (An example here is aFourier transform of the data in the key interval, with G one- ortwo-dimensional frequency spaces.) Then local regions of feature space G(feature regions), obtained through feature region selection 716, areused as input to the region feature computation step 708.

An example of this case is the computation of features from the audiotrack. The key (time) interval now could be [delta_(t1), delta_(t2)](770 in FIG. 7B) and one of the features F can be the Fourier transformof this time interval. This gives the distribution of audio frequencies,from low to high, in the time interval [delta_(t1), delta_(t2)]. Regionsin the domain [0,f_(max)) of G of the frequency distribution functionare used to compute audio features (rather than the domain being the keyinterval). Here f_(max) is the maximum frequency in the key interval.For instance, one could use a subdivision of [0, f_(max)) into equal subintervals (regions), and the output of transformation 708(region-based-feature-computation) could be simply the average value orenergy in the sub intervals.

The visual feature extraction can encompass many differenttransformations and quantizations. In the case of visual media, itincludes, computing the color histogram of a key frame, computing colorhistogram of selected spatial regions in the key frame, computing thepixel difference between two or more temporally displaced key frames,computing a measure to detect the presence of high-contrast regions in akey frame (like scene-text), or computing the optical flow or otherspatial displacements between two subsequent frames (or possible framesspaced further apart) within a key interval. FIG. 10 shows this lastcase. A video stream 1010 is the input to a video transformation 1020that computes the optical flow 1030 (transformed media). A possible wayto implement this is to select key intervals of frames 1002 . . . 1008in video stream 1010 as input to the video transformation 1020. Each keyinterval is transformed into a feature domain which in this case areindividual frames 1032 . . . 1038 of optical flow. Every pixel in theseframe contains two values, x and y, that together represent the opticalflow at the pixel in vector form (x,y)^(t). The optical flow is computedby comparing and matching two or more consecutive frames in the keyintervals. Optical flow computation is well known in the prior art.Besides optical flow, any other transformation that has as domain two ormore frames, be it consecutive frames or frames spaced apart, and mapsthis data into a function on some other domain that can be used asfeatures for categorizing video sequences.

To put it simply, the domain is the data space from which the visualfeatures are computed. The domain can be the video frame itself, whichamounts to the red, green and blue channels; or, e.g., luminance. On theother hand, the domain could be the a functional transformation of twoor more frames into a different domain, as optical flow between theframes. In that case, the domain is space of optical flow from which thevisual features are computed.

Categorization segments of a media item M, is aided by using some colorquantization, for example, the following frame color codes. The colorspace of frames (images) has been extensively used for indexing andsearching based on image content. Application of hue color code, apreferred embodiment of this invention, is comprised of a number ofsteps (see FIG. 11A).

Color is a good feature for video categorization. In particular, the huecomponent of color contains much information. Hue is the portion ofcolor information that indicates which color a particular pixel in frame1110 has. The colors range from red, green to magenta (see FIG. 11B.)Hence, from the video signal, which is as input to the system istypically in an RGB or YIQ format, the hue component has to beextracted. This requires a transformation from the original color space(RGB or YIQ) of the media item to the HSV color space. This is achievedby using the standard algorithms 1115 for color space conversions (e.g.,Foley & van Dam, Chapter 13). Once the image is transformed in to theHSV model, the hue channel is separated from the HSV model, as the codegeneration is based on the hue values of the pixels in the key frames.

Refer now to the block diagram of FIG. 11A. Let media item 750 be theinput and frame 1110 at time t₀ 760 be the current key frame. This frame1110 could be in YIQ format and is denoted as YIQ(frame) in FIG. 11A.Then in block 1175 the feature (hue) vectors 1155 for this frame arecomputed. The regions for the frame are rectangular windows 1130. Theoutput of process 1175 therefore is a vector F=(f₁₁, f₁₂, . . . ,f_(1n), f_(i1), f_(i2), . . . , f_(in), f_(N1), f_(N2), . . . , f_(Nn))with N the number of windows and n the number of color tokens perwindow.

The first step in 1175 of FIG. 11A, is to convert the the YIQ encodedframe into an HSV encoded frame 1115. This is well known in the priorart. The output then of 1115 is the hue part of the color information ofthe frame, denoted as Hue(frame) 1120. In FIG. 8A the frame is dividedup into windows 1130. (Note that these need not be rectangular, they canbe arbitrarily shaped as show in FIGS. 8 & 8A. Rectangles are a specificcase of an arbitrary shaped window.) Block 1130 outputs Hue(window) 1135for each window 901, 902, . . . , 903, . . . , 904 in the current frame.Subsequently, block 1140 determines the average hue,Average_(—)hue(window), in the windows. The averaging is the first datareduction step. (Note that other averaging methods are contemplated. Forexample in one embodiment, the median of the window instead of theaverage is used and it is more robust to noise.) The second datareduction step in 1175, is block 1150 which quantizesAverage_(—)hue(window) into a small number of quantization levels perwindow and assigns codes to each quantization level. The mechanics ofthis quantization and code assignment is explained in FIG. 11B. As notedabove, the output of step 1175 is a feature vector F=(f₁₁, f₁₂, . . . ,f_(1n), f_(i1), f_(i2), . . . , f_(in), f_(N1), f_(N2), . . . , f_(Nn))1155.

There are a number of different ways of extracting feature valuesAverage_(—)hue(window) 1145. For example, at one extreme case the huevalue at each pixel can be considered as a feature (i.e., the windowsare the pixels) or at the other extreme the hue value of all the pixelsin the frame can be averaged to generate the feature value (i.e., thewindow is the frame). In a preferred embodiment, as indicated above, theframe is divided into w₁ windows in one dimension of the image and w₂windows along the other dimension as in FIG. 9. An average hue value iscomputed based on the pixels in each window. Thus the hue color for avideo key frame is a set of w₁×w₂ average hue values. Quantized thesegive a feature vector C for each frame.

In FIG. 11B, 1180 is the hue value of a pixel. The hue values can rangefrom 0 degrees to 360 degrees, in FIG. 11B indicated by 1160 (0degrees), 1161 (30 degrees), 1162 (60 degrees), . . . , 1163 (180degrees), . . . , 1164 (330 degrees), 1165 (360 degrees). The hue valuesfrom 330 degrees (1164) through 30 degrees (1161) are centered aroundthe color pure red (1170), from 30 degrees (1161) through 90 degreesaround the color pure yellow (1171) etc. To arrive at hue featurevectors 1155, the hue value outputs of the averaging operation 1140 needto be coarsely quantized. This quantization, and code assignment, toobtain feature vectors 1155 is performed in step 1150. FIG. 11B gives apossible hue quantization, code assignment, table 1180. Coding could beperformed according to the following table

Number in Color range Code Color Figure 330 < Average_(—)hue (window) <=30  0 Red 1170 30 < Average_(—)hue (window) <= 90 1 Yellow 1171  90 <Average_(—)hue (window) <= 150 2 Green 1172 150 < Average_(—)hue(window) <= 210 3 Cyan 1173 210 < Average_(—)hue (window) <= 270 4 Blue1174 270 < Average_(—)hue (window) <= 330 5 Magenta 1175

There are several different ways in which a feature can be quantized.The choice of quantization can affect the categorization processes.

The feature-based code generation steps discussed above have beenseparated out as steps for clarity of presentation. However, these stepsare combined to minimize the computation required to generate thesefeature vectors.

The feature vector extraction and coding process described above is onespecific method of generating the feature vectors. Depending on the kindof similarity metric being used, the feature extraction and codingprocess can be significantly different. The vector representationmechanism and its efficiency in performing media item categorization arenot significantly affected by the coding scheme itself. For example, onepossible metric of similarity is the motion similarity of imagesequences, that is, here video sequences are compared based on flowrather than color. Such a coding and similarity measurement scheme canbe used within the frame work proposed in this invention (see R. Mohan,“Video Sequence Matching”, cited above).

FIG. 12 is a flowchart 1200 of the process of the visual feature vectorcomputation from the visual part of the media item. Input to thisprocess is the visual part of the media item 1210. Following this stepis the spatial and temporal quantization 1220 of the visual part in themedia item. The temporal quantization is the process of selecting keyframes or key intervals as in FIGS. 7A and 7B. The spatial quantizationis the process described in FIGS. 8 and 9. From this spatio-temporally(both in image/frame space and in time) quantized visual data, featuresare computed 1230, such as flow as in FIG. 10 and hue as in FIG. 11. Instep 1240, these feature values are coarsely quantized 1240 into a smallnumber of discrete values, or codes (e.g., the quantization 1180 of thehue values in FIG. 11B). A process of mapping or counting 1250(described in FIG. 13) derives a visual feature vector, F_(v,) 1260.

Moving on to FIG. 13, here three possible methods for constructingvisual feature vectors F_(v) are given. The visual part of the mediaitem 1310 consists in this figure of key frames or key intervals 1303,1306, and 1309. Let N be the number of key frames or key intervals, Wthe number of windows (regions) per key frame/interval, and C the numberof codes for a visual feature.

A first method to determine a visual feature vector is given in FIG.13A. The visual feature vector 1320 here is determined by a mappings1325, 1327 from quantized feature values c₁, c₂, c₃ of key intervals tothe feature vector 1320. The coded feature values c₁, c₂, c₃ are mapped1325 to entries of the visual feature vector 1320. In that case, for aspecific feature, the visual feature vector will be of length W×N, whereW is the number of regions per key interval and N is the number of keyintervals. Alternatively, the codes c₁, c₂, c₃ could represent theabsence ‘c=0’ or presence ‘c=1’ of a certain feature; or, the codes c₁,c₂, c₃ could represent the absence ‘c=0’ or the amount of presence‘c=x’, with 1≦x≦C where C is some upper bound. An example of the formercould be the color feature red, an example of the latter could be avisual motion feature. Note that the length of the visual feature vectorF_(v) depends on the number of key intervals N, the number of regions W,and the number of codes C. That is, the length is N×W. Both spatial andtemporal information about the key interval is preserved in the visualfeature vector F_(v).

A second method to determine a visual feature vector is given in FIG.13B. The visual feature vector 1330 here is determined by a counting1335, 1337 the occurrences of feature code values in the key intervals.Key interval 1303 has codes c=1, 2, . . . , 6 (in this case the numberof codes C is 6) associated with each of the spatial regions. The first6 elements of the visual feature vector F_(v) 1330 are determined bycounting the codes in the first key interval 1303. Code 1 is associatedwith 8 spatial regions, hence F_(v)(1)=8, code 2 is associated with 4spatial regions, hence F_(v)(2)=4, and so forth. The next 6 elements ofthe visual feature vector F_(v) 1330 are determined by counting 1337 thecodes in the second key interval 1306. This process is repeated for allkey intervals and all visual features. Note that again the length of thevisual feature vector F_(v) depends on the number of key intervals N butnot on the number regions W. In particular, the length of the visualfeature vector is N×C. Also note that the information of the spatialarrangement of the codes in the key intervals is lost.

A third method to determine a visual feature vector is given in FIG.13C. The visual feature vector 1340 . . . 1350 here is again determinedby a counting 1345, 1355 the occurrences of feature code values in thekey intervals 1303, 1306, 1309, . . . . In this case, the counting 1345,1355 is performed by determining the number of times a code occurs overcorresponding regions in the key intervals. The first part 1340 of thevisual feature vector F_(v) is determined by the first region W(1,1)(the upper-left window) of the key intervals. The first element of thevisual feature vector is the number of times that c=1 appears in theregions W(1,1), in this case 2 times. The second element of the visualfeature vector is the number of times that c=2 appears in the regionsW(1,1), in this case 0 times. This counting is done for all featurecodes c=1, . . . , C, where C is the largest code number. The secondpart 1350 of the visual feature vector F_(v) is determined by theregions W(1,2) (second region in first row) of the key intervals. Thefirst element of this part 1350 of the visual feature vector is thenumber of times that c=1 appears in W(1,2), in this case 2 times. Thesecond element of the visual feature vector is the number of times thatc=2 appears in W(1,2), in this case 1 times. This counting is done forall feature codes c=1, . . . , C, where C is the largest code number.Note that the length of the visual feature vector for this particularvisual feature is now equal to W×C. Also note that for this type offeature code occurrence counting the temporal information is lost.

The methods in FIGS. 13A and 13B preserve temporal information and,therefore, the length of vector F_(v) depends on N. For the method inFIG. 13C, the length of vector F_(v) does not depend on N but thespatial information is lost. It is desirable that the length of vectorF_(v) does not depend on N; that the temporal information is discarded;and, that the spatial information is maintained.

FIG. 13D shows a preferred specific methods for determining a visualfeature vectors F_(v) from the visual part of the media item 1310. Thekey frames or key intervals 1356, 1353, 1360, . . . , 1359 are selectedfrom a media item. However, by rearranging these key frames orintervals, 1383, 1386, etc., these key frames or intervals are orderedinto a new sequence 1320 of key intervals 1353, 1356, 1359, . . . , 1360according to the value of visual feature that is to be encoded in thevisual feature vector F_(v). For example, the visual feature of averageframe brightness can be ordered from high to low in the sequence 1320.Or, the visual feature of average optical flow in key intervals can beordered from high to low in 1320. The effect and purpose of thisordering is that the temporal information in the video stream isdiscarded. (This is analogous to discarding word location information inusing word frequency vectors, e.g., F_(t), in text document analysis.)The visual feature value codes (quantized feature values) in the regionsof the key frames or intervals are then mapped 1365 into a first visualfeature vector F _(v) 1370. Assume that there are n key frames orintervals in media item 1310 with W regions per key frame this gives afeature vector F _(v) 1370 of length N=n×W. So we have the first orderedkey frame or interval 1353 through the n-th ordered key frame orinterval 1360. Code c₁₁ in region W(1,1) of the first key interval 1353is mapped to the first element of F _(v) 1370, code c₂₁ in region W(1,1)of the second key interval 1356 is mapped to the second element of F_(v) 1370, code c₃₁ in region W(1,1) of the third key interval 1359 ismapped to the third element of F _(v) 1370, and code c_(n1) in regionW(1,1) of the n-th region 1360 is mapped to the n-th element of F _(v)1370. Then, code c₁₂ in region W(1,2) of the first key interval 1353 ismapped to the (n+1)-th element of F _(v) 1370, code c₂₂ in region W(1,2)of the second key interval 1356 is mapped to the (n+2)-th element of F_(v) 1370, code c₃₂ in region W(1,2) of the third key interval 1359 ismapped to the (n+3)-th element of F _(v) 1370, and code c_(N2) in regionW(1,2) of the n-th key interval 1360 is mapped to the 2n-th element of F_(v) 1370. This process is repeated till all codes in all key intervalsare mapped into vector F _(v) 1370. Note that the length 1367 of theresulting visual feature vector 1370 F _(v) is N=n×W (1371). Thisprocess is further described in FIG. 14A.

The last step in FIG. 13D is to map 1375 visual feature vector 1370 F_(v) to a fixed-length visual feature vector F_(v) 1380. The length ofthis vector is M, F_(v)=(k₁, k₂, . . . , k_(M)). We require here thatM=m_(s)×W<N=n×W.

There two preferred methods to achieve this, sub sampling vector F _(v)and averaging components of F _(v). These are described below and asprocess 1440 and process 1470 of FIG. 14B, respectively. For subsampling m_(s)=m_(c), for averaging, m_(s)=m_(f).

A first method is sub-sampling F _(v). Let m_(c)=┌N/M┐, the ceiling of Ndivided by M, the sampling factor of vector F _(v) to obtain F_(v). Theconstant M should be an integer multiple of W, let m=M/W. Sub samplingthis vector F _(v) is achieved as follows. Let F _(v)=(R(1), R(2), . . ., R(W)), where each R(i), i=1, . . . , W, R(i)=(r(i, 1), r(i, 2), r(i,3), . . . , r(i, n)) of length n represents a key interval region W(i).Then F _(v)=(r(1,1), r(1,2), . . . , r(1,n), . . . , r(i,1), . . . ,r(i,n), r(W,1), . . . , r(W,n)). The vector F_(v) is then (R(1), R(2), .. . , R(W)), where each R(i) is obtained by sub-sampling R(i). That is,R(i)=(r(i,1), r(i,1+m_(c)), . . . , r(i,m)). This is further explainedas process 1440 in FIG. 14B.

A second method to shorten F _(v) is to average components in F _(v)vector to obtain a vector F_(v) of fixed length M. Let m_(f)=└N/M┘, thefloor of N divided by M, the number of components of vector F _(v) toobtain F_(v). The constant M is again an integer multiple of W, letm=M/W. Again, F _(v)=(R(1), R(2), . . . , R(W)), with each R(i), i=1, .. . , W, representing a region in a key interval. That is, R(1)represents the first region W(1,1), also denoted as W(1), an so on. Thevector components of F _(v) are R(i)=(r(i,1), r(i, 2), r(i, 3), . . . ,r(i, n)) of length n represent a region W(i) of the key intervals. Letthe shortened vector F_(v)=(R(1), R(2), . . . , R(W)), withR(i)=(r(i,1), r(i, 2), r(i, 3), . . . , r(i, m)). Then each vector R(i)is mapped into a corresponding shorter vector R(i) as:R(i)=(r(i,1), . . . , r(i, m)); with r(i, j)=avg[r(i, (j−1)m _(f)+1), r(i,(j−1)m _(f)+2), . . . , r (i,(j−1)m _(f) +m)],

This shortening of the vector F _(v) to the vector F_(v) is described inthe flowchart process 1470 of FIG. 14B.

In FIG. 14A, is a flowchart of the process for computing the firstvisual feature vector F _(v) 1370 from the media item 1310 is shown.Input to this process is media item 1310 and in step 1401, key frames orkey intervals are selected. (This process is described in FIGS. 7A andB.) The output is a set of key intervals labeled k_(i), i=1, . . . , n(1402). The number of key intervals n depends on the length of the mediaitem. Process 1403 sorts these key intervals based on a visual property.As noted above, the visual feature of average frame brightness can beordered from high to low 1380. Or, the visual feature of average opticalflow in key intervals can be ordered from high to low 1380. The effectand purpose of this ordering is tat the temporal information in thevideo stream is discarded. (This is analogous to discarding wordlocation information in using word frequency vectors, e.g., F_(t), intext document analysis.) The output 1320 of process 1403 is a set of keyintervals labeled k_(j), j=1, . . . , n (1320). This is the set of n keyintervals, 1353, 1356, 1359, . . . , 1360 of FIG. 13D. The process,then, of populating the first visual feature F _(v) 1370 with theelements c_(ij) of the ordered key intervals 1353, 1356, 1359, . . .starts at step 1410. First, in step 1412, the pointers i, j, k, are setto 1 i=j=k=1. In step 1414, F _(v) (k) is set to c_(ij). Subsequently,both i and k are incremented in 1416. The next step is to check if i>n,if not 1418, the next element of F _(v) (k) is set to the element c_(ij)of the next key interval. If i>n 1420, j is incremented 1422, meaningthat the next window of the key intervals will be handled. A test isperformed first to determine if j>W. If not 1424, on the other hand, thec_(ij) of the next window are entered into visual feature vector F _(v).if yes 1426, this means that all window visual feature vectors areentered into F _(v) and the process ends 1428.

The flowcharts in FIG. 14B describe two shortening processes 4132 of thevector F _(v) 1430 to the vector F_(v) 1434. Two processes forshortening the vector F _(v) 1430 are described in this figure, theprocess of sub sampling F _(v) 1440 (on the left) and the process ofaveraging F _(v) 1470 (on the right).

The process 1440 starts at step 1441. In step 1442, the variables W (thenumber of regions per key interval), N (length of F_(v)), M (length ofF_(v)), m_(c)=┌N/M┐ (the sub sample rate), m=M/W, and the vector F _(v)are input to the system. Additionally, the variables i, w, s are set toone, i=w=s=1. In step 1444, F_(v) (s) is set to F _(v) (w), i.e., acomponent of the short visual feature vector is set to a component ofthe longer visual feature vector, which results in sub sampling of thekey intervals of F _(v). Step 1446 increments the variable w by m_(c).In test 1448, it is checked whether w>i W, i.e., if a complete keyinterval has been sub sampled. If not 1450, the variable s isincremented in by 1 in step 1452 and step 1444 is repeated. If yes 1454,in step 1456 i is incremented by 1 and w is set to i m+1. This w is thenext component of F _(v) to sub sample. A further test 1458, determinesif s>M. If no 1460, the vector F_(v) (of length M) is not completelyfilled yet and s is set to s+1 in step 1452 and the process is repeatedstarting with step 1444. If test 1458 is true, on the other hand, thevector F_(v) of fixed length M is output in step 1464 and the subsampling process stops in 1466.

The process 1470 starts at step 1471. In step 1472, the variables W (thenumber of regions per key interval), N (length of F_(v)), M (length ofF_(v)), m_(f)=└N/M┘ (the averaging rate), m=M/W, and the vector F _(v)are input to the system. Additionally, the variables i, w, s are set toone, i=w=s=1. In step 1444, F_(v) (s) is set to the average of the m_(f)component of F _(v), F _(v) (w), F _(v)(w+W), F _(v) (w+2W), . . . , F_(v)(w+m_(f)−1)W), i.e., a component of the short visual feature vectoris set to the average of corresponding m_(f) component of the longervisual feature vector F _(v). That is,F _(v)(s)=[ F _(v)(w)+ F _(v)(w+W)+ F _(v)(w+2W)+ . . . + F _(v)(w+(m_(f)−1)W)]/m _(f).

Step 1476 increments the variable w by m_(f). In test 1478, it ischecked whether w>i W, i.e., if a complete key interval has beenhandled. If not 1480, the variable s is incremented in by 1 in 1482 andthe averaging step 1474 is repeated. If yes 1484, in step 1486 i isincremented by 1 and w is set to i m+1. This w is the right component ofF _(v) to proceed with further filling of F_(v) by averaging. A furthertest 1488, determines if s>M. If no 1460, the vector F_(v) (of length M)is not completely filled yet and s is set to s+1 in step 1482 and theprocess is repeated starting with step 1474. If test 1488 is true, onthe other hand, the vector F_(v) of fixed length M is output in step1494 and the averaging process stops in 1496.

FIG. 15 shows a flowchart of the process 1500 of combining the visualfeature vector F_(v) 1510 and the textual feature vector F_(t) 1520. Theoutput is a combined feature vector F 1560 that represents suchdisparate sources of information as textual information (e.g., speechtranscript) and visual information (i.e., images or sequences ofimages). These vectors are used in process 400 of FIG. 4 to induceclassifiers. The vectors may be labeled or unlabeled and the learning issupervised and unsupervised, respectively. Process 1500 (in FIG. 15) areoptionally transformed to assure compatibility in various ways. There isan optional transformation 1530 of the visual feature vector F_(v) andan optional transformation 1540 of the textual feature vector F_(t).These transformations can be with respect to range of the feature valuesappearing in the two kinds of vectors F_(v) and F_(t), this is achievedby scaling (normalization) or re-quantization. The transformations mayalso have to be performed with respect to the competitive lengths of thetwo kinds of vectors with respect to some norm or measure. In step 1550the textual feature vector F_(t) 1520 and the visual feature vectorF_(v) 1510 are combined by concatenation to produce a unifiedrepresentation in a single vector of disparate kinds of features. Havingcreated the unified representation, the combined feature vector F 1560,of the training data, standard methods of classifier induction are used.

Turning our attention now to FIG. 16, here is shown a system diagram ofthe present invention. The media item 1601 could be in any format likeNTSC/PAL 1603, MPEG1/MPEG2 file or stream 1609, AVI file or stream 1613,some arbitrary format xxx 1619 or Real Video 1623. Depending on theformat of the media, it is processed through the corresponding decoder,NTSC/PAL 1603 through the frame grabber hardware 1607, MPEG1/MPEG2through the MPEG Decoder 1611, AVI 1613 through the AVI Decoder 1617,some unknown format xxx 1619 through the corresponding decoder 1621, andReal Video 1623 through the Real Video Decoder 1627.

The output of each of the decoders in FIG. 16 will be some generic videoframe format like RGB or YIQ 1629 and the data will be in machinereadable form. The media item categorization algorithm operates on this1629 data. The categorization engine 1633, first computed visual andtextual vector representations, F_(v) and F_(t), respectively from thedecoded media item 1629 and uses category representations 1631 togenerate the category 1637.

In FIG. 17 the idea of associating a feature vector F with a blocks ofthe media item as opposed to associating the feature vector with theentire media item is introduced. The feature vector F is then a functionof time of frame number F(t) or F(n), as introduced in FIG. 17B. Toemphasize the fact that the media item or stream has time associatedwith it, we refer to such a media item as M(t) 1750. But first considerFIG. 17A where is show the feature vector F 1755 computation of a mediaitem 1700. Let the media item 1700 be a visual media stream. The streamcontains textual information 1710, either in the form of captioning orin the form of an an audio track (or both), and visual information 1720in the form of a sequence of images (frames). An individual frame in themedia stream is associated with a frame number n 1725, which correspondsto unique time t 1715 in the stream, given that the stream starts at n=0and t=0. The media item is of length T 1718 in terms of time and oflength N 1728 in terms of frames. If there are 30 frames per second andT is expressed in seconds, then N=30 T. The textual feature vector F_(t)(refer to FIG. 14) is computed from the textual information 1710. Thevisual feature vector F_(v) (refer to FIG. 14) is computed from a subsetof the frames, as described in FIGS. 7A and 7B. In the case of FIG. 17A,these are the key frames (or key intervals) n₁ (1730), n₂ (1735), n₃(1740), and n₄ (1745).

FIG. 17B is focussed on generating feature vectors F(t) or F(n) with theultimate aim of dividing up a media steam 1750 into contiguous segmentsof one or more categories. In FIG. 17B, a media stream 1750 of length T1754 seconds and N 1758 frames is shown. As opposed to the media item1700 in FIG. 17A, where it is assumed that the item is about one subjector category, for media item 1750, the topic, subject or category of themedia item may change as a function of time t 1715. Similar to FIG. 17A,key frames (or key intervals) n₁ (1761), n₂ (1762), n₃ (1763), n₄ (1764)through n₉ (1769) are selected based on some visual criterion. However,in this case, the textual F_(t) and visual feature vector F_(v) aredetermined from an continuous subset of the media stream, subset 1780 ofthe textual information and subset 1790 of the visual information. Thiscontinuous subset of textual and visual information is called a “block.”Here the continuous subset is of length T₀ 1785 seconds or N₀ 1795frames (N₀=30×T₀). The textual feature vector F_(t) is computed from allthe textual information in block 1780. The visual feature vector F_(v),on the other hand, is computed from the key intervals that are containedin block 1790. For the block, the key intervals are n₂ (1762) and n₃(1763). A visual feature vector F_(v) is computed from these keyintervals by one of the methods described in FIG. 13. The textual F_(t)and visual feature vector F_(v) are then combined into a overall featurevector F(n₀) or F(t₀) 1775 by the process described in FIG. 15. By usingsuch a moving block of both visual and textual information, a categoryand/or topic C(n) or C(t) 1780 is obtained as a function of time t 1715or frame number n 1725. It is this function that this invention uses todivide the media item into segments that correspond to differentcategories.

In FIG. 17C, the media stream 1750 of length T 1754 seconds and N 1758frames is indexed in a third way, by word count w 1797. Here there are W1799 words in media item w, 1≦w≦W. Category and or topic can then alsoexpressed a function of word count, w, i.e., C(w) 1785.

Continuing to FIG. 18, here is shown the process 1800 for dividing upthe media item M(t) 1750 into contiguous time segments where eachsegment is associated with one or more classes and the segments areoptionally aggregated into larger more homogeneous segments according tocertain rules. Here the rules can be heuristic rules, learned rules fromtraining data, or both.

Storage device 1810 contains one or streaming multimedia items M(t)1750. Output of this device 1810 is the temporal multimedia item 1750,which, importantly, in this figure is not of one single category but canbe a concatenation of one or more multimedia segments of differentcategory (subject/topic). Device 1810 streams a multimedia item M(t)1750, which in block process 1820 is divided up into blocks. This is theprocess described in FIG. 17. The output 1820 is a block of multimediadata B(t) 1830, which is a function of time t. Each block contains aportion of textual data 1780 (see FIG. 17) plus a portion of visual data1790 (FIG. 17). The length of these blocks depends on the frequency ofchange in category in the multimedia item M(t) 1750. Each block B(t)1830 is in itself a multimedia item. Using the prior art described inFIG. 1, a sparse textual feature vector F_(t)(t) is extracted, further,using the novel techniques described in FIG. 13, a sparse visual featurevector F_(v)(t) is extracted in step 1840 from block B(t) 1830. Usingthe vector combining process described in FIG. 15, these two vectors arecombined in process 1840 into vector F(t) 1850, which is the output ofprocess 1840. The application process 1860, uses the classificationphase 615 (described in FIG. 6 with the target media stream M 660 equalto B(t) 1830). Output 1870, C(t), of this application process 1860 is acategorization/classification of the media stream M(t) 1750 as afunction of time t. At each time t, one or more categories areassociated with media stream 1750, denoted as C(t).

There are a number of problems associated with this output 1870 C(t).Even if the classification error for each block is small, say 5%, forexample, there is a possible random error in every 20 key frames, keyintervals, or blocks of key intervals. These problems are described inthe next figure, FIG. 19. An optional aggregation process 1880 developsthe output 1870, C(t), into output 1890, C(t), according to one or moreaggregation rules. These rules can be heuristic and/or can be learned. Aheuristic approach is given in FIG. 20. An approach, based on machinelearning, is described in FIG. 21-22.

But first, in FIG. 19, the problems with output 1870 C(t) are described.FIG. 19A shows a graph 1900 of the discrete changes in the true categoryC_(t) 1905 of a streaming media item M(t) 1750, as a function of time t,frame number n, or word count w 1906. The length of the media item is Tseconds, N frames, W words 1903. This media item M(t) is, for example, aportion of a news program. The media item starts with a segment 1910about “US President,” category c₁, this is followed by a segment 1915 inthe category “European Union,” category c₂. Segment 1915 is followed bya segment 1920 about the weather 1920 (category c₃), which is also thecategory of the sixth segment 1935. Between the two weather segments1920 and 1935, there is a segment 1925 about “Free trade,” category c₄,followed by a segment about “Crime in the cities,” category c₅. Themedia item ends with segment 1940 about, “Baseball league,” category c₆.Hence, the true category C_(t) 1905 of the media item is a function oftime, for example, for interval 1910 C_(t)(t)=c₁, for interval 1915C_(t)(t)=c₂, for intervals 1920 and 1935 C_(t)(t)=c₃ (the weather), andso on. The function C_(t)(t) is a discrete function, the function cantake on one or more values of a finite number of categories. (A mediaitem does not have to be classified into one distinct class, it may beclassified into a multitude of classes.)

FIG. 19B shows a graph 1950 of the estimated categorization function(classifier output) C(t) 1955 (1870 in FIG. 18) as a function of time t1906 as obtained by application process 1860 in FIG. 18. This functionis an illustrative example and not an actual depiction of what the graphwould look like. In reality the function is discreet andmisclassifications do not necessarily lie close to the true class. Thefunction is also a function of frame number n 1906 and word count w1906, C(n) and C(w), respectively. Category C(t) 1955 is shown as aone-dimensional function 1955. If the category C(t) could be computedperfectly, this function would be equal to the discrete functionC_(t)(t) of FIG. 19A. However, due to noise and other problems, thefunction C(t) 1955 is only approximately equal to the true functionC_(t)(t). That is, C(t)≈c₁ 1960 in segment 1910, C(t)≈c₂ 1965 in segment1915, C(t)≈c₃ 1970 in segment 1920, . . . , C(t)≈c₆ 1990 in segment1940. Here “C(t)≈c₁” means that C(t)=c₁ at many of the sample points twhere C(t) is computed.

A first problem is that the calculated categorization of the blockswithin the true segments, 1910, 1915, 1920, . . . , 1940, varies and issubject to outlying categorizations within the true segments from thetrue category C_(t) 1905, that is, C(t) not always equals C_(t).Furthermore, because of the block process (described in FIG. 17), therewill always be blocks that span different segments of differentcategories. This will be the case at the true segment boundaries like1991, 1994, 1996, where the category changes. Consider, for example, theboundaries between true category segments 1910 and 1915. Here a block ofdata 1961 is used denoted by B(t) 1962, from this block of data, afeature vector F(t) 1963 is computed. This feature vector is classifiedinto a class C(t) 1964 according to media item categorization describedin, e.g., FIG. 16. However, because the block 1961 spans multiple truecategory segments, the output of the classifier in these type of regionsis unreliable.

FIG. 20A shows a temporal display of a portion of the media stream ofFIG. 19. This partial media item starts with a segment 1910 of categoryc₁ “US President,” this is followed by a segment 1915 of category c₂,“European Union .” Segment 1915 is followed by a segment 1920 about theweather 1920 (category c₃). The true C_(t)(t) 1905, as a function oftime t, frame number n, or word count w 1906 is shown in the upperregion. Also shown is the classification of the media item as a functionof time C(t) 1955 in the lower region. In reality this classification isa sequence of categories, c₁c₈c₁ . . . c₂c₁, each classification isobtained from a block of multimedia B(t) 1962 where the blocks aredetermined as in FIG. 17 and the category for each block is determinedas in described in FIG. 18. Within a media segment of a certaincategory, there will be random misclassifications. This is shown, forexample, as the C(t) 1955 for segment 1910, which isc₁c₈c₁c₁c₂c₁c₁c₁c₇c₁c₁. A number of heuristic rules 2050 on how theaggregate the local classifications are shown in FIG. 20A. A first ruleis that a media item segment of a certain category should be at least sseconds 2055, where s is dependent on the type of programming. Animmediate consequence of this rule is that there are few changes incategory over time, that is, C(t) 1955 is a discrete function and eachdiscrete value is taken on for longer time intervals (>s seconds 2055).An aggregation process 1880 (FIG. 18) process groups the localclassifications c into larger segments of the same category. Examples ofsuch rules are

c_(x)c_(y)c_(x) → c_(x)c_(x)c_(x) 2060 c_(x)c_(x)c_(y)c_(y)c_(x) →c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x) 2065 c_(x)c_(y)c_(y)c_(x)c_(x) →c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x) 2070 c_(x)c_(x)c_(y)c_(y)c_(y)c_(x)c_(x) →c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x)c_(x) 2075

Repeated application of these rules changes the local classificationswhich may initially be fragmented, and will change the localclassifications into more contiguous segments of constant category. FIG.20A concentrates on rules of sequences of block classifications, orblock classifications within segments of a single category. That is,these are region-based rules.

FIG. 20B, on the other hand, concentrates on rules for finding theboundaries between segments of different categories. Classification C(t)1955 of the blocks around the boundaries are unreliable because theseclassifications are based on blocks B(t) 1830 that span multiplecategories of the underlying media M(t) 1750. A number of cues 2000 fromthe multimedia can be used to more accurately find category boundaries.The exact location of the categories boundaries can be pinpointed byusing the various modalities that are present in a media item. The cuesin these various modalities are audio silences 2005, speaker changes2010, end-of-sentence indications in the speech transcript 2015, a shotbreak in the visual track 2020, and the presence of “>>” in theclosed-captioning (“>>” is intended to indicate change of subject) 2025.

Given the combined feature vectors F(t), i.e., the vector representingthe visual information F_(v)(t) combined with the vector representingthe textual information F_(t)(t), each block can be classified into acategory. One way to achieve this is to use a classifier to categorizeevery block independently using the combined feature vector of theblock. A series of heuristic rules such as described in FIGS. 20A and20B can then be used to aggregate the categorization and more accuratelydetermine the category boundaries.

Another way to achieve this is to build a model for predicting thecategories of the blocks, consisting of states, based on states of otherblocks. Each block can be associated with one state. The categorizerthen predicts a cost of each state associated with every block based onthe combined feature vector. The optimal sequence of states is selectedby minimizing the cost. The category can be equal to the state or thecategory can be a function of the state. This approach is described inFIGS. 21 and 22.

Consider the simplified flowchart of FIG. 21A that takes media streamM(t) 2105 as input, or, equivalently, that takes a stream of visual andtextual feature vectors F(t) 2110 as input. Here is shown system 2100, acategorization process (also called, application process) 1860 followedby aggregation process 1880, exactly as in FIG. 18. Assume we only havetwo categories, i.e., “sport” and “disaster” denoted by C₁ and C₂,respectively. The features F_(i)=F (t_(i)) 2110 for each block can beone of three values: F_(s) sport scene, F_(t) talking head, and F_(d)disaster scene. The input 2110 to the system is a sequence of featurevector F_(i)=F (t_(i)) 2110, which takes on values F_(s), F_(t) andF_(d) derived from (a block of the) media stream M(t) 2105.

In a simple model, we let the state for each block be the categoryassociated with the block, i.e., the category or state can only be“sport” or “disaster.” The classifier then is C (F_(s))=C₁, C(F_(d))=C₂, C (F_(t))=C₁ or C₂. The output of the application process1840 is C_(i)=C(t_(i))=S(t_(i)) 2115. The idea then is to transform thesequence of ambiguous categories or states C_(i)=C(t_(i))=S(t_(i)) intoa sequence of unambiguous states S(t_(i)) 2120 (or, equivalently, asequence of categories C _(i)=C(t_(i))), which is of minimal cost, ascomputed in 1860. That is, input media stream 2105 is categorized into asmoothly labeled (categorized) stream 2120.

To achieve this, in the process 2150 of FIG. 21B, using training data2130 and an optional set of manual rules 2135, a set of multi modalitystate transition costs L (C_(i), C_(j)); i=1, 2, j=1, 2 (2140) isdetermined.

A possibility for the process of determining state transition costs inprocess 2150 and the aggregation process 1880 is, e.g., a Markov model.In a Markov probability model, the probability of a sequence of statess₁, . . . , s_(T) (each state takes on the value “sport”=C₁ or“disaster”=C₂) is decomposed asp(s ₁ , . . . , s _(T))=p(s ₁)p(s ₂ |s ₁) . . . p(s _(T) |s _(T−1)).

To estimate the conditional probability p(C₂|C₁) (where C₁ or C₂indicates “sport” or “disaster” and, e.g., p(C₂|C₁)=L(C₁, C₂) in 2140),we count the number occurrences # (C₁, C₂) of the sequence segmentss_(i−1), s_(i) in the training set 2130 such that s_(i−1)=C₁ ands_(i)=C₂. The conditional probability can then be estimated asp(C ₂ |C ₁)=#(C ₁ , C ₂)/#{(C ₁ , C); C=sport, disaster}.

That is, in system 2150 of FIG. 20B, p(C₂|C₁) is the number of timesthat category C₁ is followed by category C₂ divided by the number oftimes that category C₁ is followed by any category. In one model, thecost function L(C₁, C₂) 2140 an be selected to be −log p(C₂|C₁). Hence,when the probability of the transition of one state to another is low,the corresponding cost is high.

In aggregation process 1880 (of FIGS. 18 and 21A) the most likelysequence of states s₁, . . . , s_(T) is computed. The more likely asequence of states s₁, . . . , s_(T) is, the less the total costTotal cost=L(s ₂ , s ₁)+L(s ₃ , s ₂)+ . . . +L(s _(T) , s _(T−1))=L(C ₂, C ₁)+L(C ₃ , C ₂)+ . . . +L(C_(T) , C _(T−1)).

This cost is minimized in 1880 over all possible sequences of states s₁,. . . , s_(T), or, equivalently, over all possible sequences ofcategories C₁, . . . , C_(T), resulting in C _(i)=C(t_(i))=S(t_(i)) 2120

For some example rules and costs now see FIG. 22. Assume that the blockbased classifier output indicates that

-   -   F_(s)→sport    -   F_(t)→sport or disaster    -   F_(d)→disaster        where F_(s), F_(t), and F_(d) are combined textual and visual        feature vectors as shown in 2205. Further assume that from the        Markov state model 2150 described in FIG. 21B, it is observed        that 2210:

L(sport, sport) is small L(sport, disaster) is large L(disaster, sport)is large L(disaster, disaster) is small

Imagine we have the sequence 2215. Based upon the visual and auditoryinformation, frame 2220 has feature vector F_(s) (2225), frame 2230 hasfeature vector F_(t) (2235), and frame 2240 has feature vector F_(s)(2245). That is we have the following the following sequence of featurevectors

-   -   F_(s)→F_(t)→F_(s)

Without state modeling, there are two interpretations from theclassifier using 2205:

-   -   sport→sport→sport→sport    -   sport→disaster→sport→sport

The first interpretation is more likely 2250 by using our state model2210.

For the second sequence 2255, we have frame 2260 has feature vectorF_(s) (2265), frame 2270 has feature vector F_(t) (2275), and frame 2280has feature vector F_(s) (2285). And we have the sequence of featurevectors

-   -   F_(s)→F_(d)→F_(t)

Again, there are two interpretations using the classifier (without statemodeling, using 2205):

-   -   sport→disaster→sport    -   sport→disaster→disaster

Consequently, using 2210, the second interpretation 2290 is the morelikely one. FIGS. 21 and 22 are just an example of the use of statetransition learning for smoothing the categorization of video over timeand thereby arriving and a better segmentation. Other methods areobvious to those skilled in the art.

We continue by listing a number of business applications that are hardor impossible to achieve with prior art technology. After describingthese applications, we pictorially give a further explanation in FIGS.23–27. A first number of uses are:

-   -   i. Categorizing media elements into a number of categories. For        example, let the media element be a news item and let us        predefine categories like, sports, weather, politics. The        addition of visual features, beyond textual features, in the        feature vector that represents the media elements allows for        more precise (in the sense of a lower error rate) categorization        of the media element.    -   ii. Automatically determining a number of natural categories        that a set of media elements can be partitioned into. That is,        discovering a set of categories that describes the set of media        element compactly. Here the addition of visual features, beyond        textual features, in the feature vector that represent the media        elements allows for more refined partitioning of the media        elements.    -   iii. Given that a media element has been classified into a        category that is either predefined as in 1) or automatically        learned as in 2) the current invention allows to more precisely        assign a topic to the classified media element. Say that a media        element has been classified as a sports video segment, the        addition of visual features allows for better, (i.e., more        accurately) assigning a topic (basketball, soccer, golf, etc.)        to the given media element.    -   iv. The combination of textual features and visual features into        one feature vector that represents the media element enables        better detection or identification of a media element in a        certain category with a certain topic, in a collection of media        elements. Here, better detection means lower false positive and        lower false negative rates.    -   v. The combination of textual features and visual features into        one feature vector that represents the media element enables        better detection or identification of a particular media        element, in a collection of media elements. Here, better        detection means lower false positive and lower false negative        rates.    -   vi. The automatic generation of MPEG-7 descriptors, as defined        by the International Organisation for        Standardisation/Organisation Internationale de Normalisation,        ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 specification “Coding of Moving Pictures        and Audio.” These descriptors are metadata items (digitally        encoded annotations) which would be embedded in the bitstreams        of videos (television; movies), sometime between the time of        content creation (“filming” or “capture”) and the time of        broadcast/release. These metadata items are then available to        all downstream processes (post-production/editing stages of        preparation of the complete video product, distribution channels        for movie releases, or by receivers/viewers of the broadcast),        for various purposes, in particular, retrieval from video        archives by content-based querying (in other words, facilitating        the finding of video clips of interest, or a specific video        clip, from within large collections of video). The descriptors        can be used to explicitly label events of interest in a video        when they happen, such as the scoring of goals in soccer        matches. Manually-controlled processes for creation of such        annotations are available now, but the work is tedious and        expensive.

The business process patent covers the use of the invention in each ofthe following specific business applications.

The invention has many direct applications:

A first application is locating (illegal) copies of media items on theInternet or other (public) databases. This application involvessearching for digital copies of media elements on the Internet or other(public) databases. With the wide spread use of digital media (audio andvideo), the illegal copying and distribution of media are becoming asignificant problem for the media industry. For example, there are anumber of web sites that post illegal copies of video on the Internet.The media is encoded in one of the popular formats (AVI, MPEG1 or MPEG2for video). Typically, the filenames under which the media is posted,are not indicative of the content of the media files. To identify aposted media item as a known media item, a comparison of the mediacontent of the file (video and audio) is necessary.

The classification method described in this invention can be used toperform this comparison. In this case, the media items of interest (sayseveral movies) are used as the reference media items to generate arepresentation in terms of textual/visual feature vectors. Theclassification engine is now deployed with these vectors. The targetmedia items are transferred from web sites at the Internet to thecomputing system that houses the classification engine described in thisinvention. That is, the media element needs to be downloaded to themachine on which the classification engine is running. The downloadingoperation can be achieved in multiple ways, an operator could feed URL'sto down loader software, which would download the files to the localmachine or alternatively, a web crawler robot could be designed tolocate URL's that hold media files. This can be done by looking at thefilename extensions (.mpeg, etc). The URL's located by the crawler robotor human operator can be filtered based on various criteria, like sizeof the media items, to generate a list of URL's for downloaded software.

Once a target media item has been downloaded to the local machine, theclassification engine is deployed to generate an report aboutsimilarities to the media items of interest.

This application provides functionality similar to video water markingin that the search engine detects the intrinsic properties (features) ofthe media item instead of the embedded water marks.

The present invention can be employed in the management of large videodatabases. Such collections of video clips (media items) need to bemanaged and searched in several environments like TV news, documentary,movie and sitcom productions. In these production environments, mediaitems in the database will be used to produce program material, oftenthe same media item in different productions. It is important to keeptrack of the usage of a media item from the perspective of rightsmanagement and royalty payments. The media item classificationtechnologies discussed in this invention can be used in this process.

Every media item (s) which is entered into the database is first used astarget media item and searched against a data structure of featurevectors that represent the reference media items in the database. Thisoperation generates an index report of similar media items in thedatabase. The media item to be entered into the database is stored alongwith similar media items, items of the same category.

The feature vector the data structure is stored along with the databaseand used retrieve content. As per the above procedure, the datastructure of feature vectors will continually grow as more and moremedia items are added to the database. Several tasks, like removingredundant copies of the media items, selecting all media items incertain categories and with certain topics, etc., are straightforwardlyaccomplished.

This invention can be used to segment a video stream into a series oftime-continuous media items. Given that a large number of (categories,topic) pairs are defined, a target video stream can be categorized, witha topic associated, as a function of t, time, or n, frame number. Thisis achieved by determining a combined textual/visual feature vector as afunction of time or frame number. A certain window of text and visualinformation is used to compute the feature vector. Typically, thiswindow is continuous time for audio data and, thus, continuous time fortextual data. The window is discrete time for visual information, withthe finest time resolution each frame. The window can be causal, i.e.,[t, t+T] and [n, n+N], or non-causal, i.e., [t−T/2, t+T/2] and [n−N,n+M]. Here, (t, n), (t+T, n+N), (t−T/2, n−N), (t+T/2, n+M) arecorresponding (time, frame number) pairs. The sequences of frames n−N, .. . , n and n−N, . . . , n+M, do not have to be subsequent frames orevenly spaced frames. The frames, n, n−N, n+M can be selected to be keyframes, or frames with other special characteristics, e.g.,maximal/minimal apparent motion or optical flow.

Classifying the media stream within the window, with the means describedin the current invention, results in a discrete function C(t), i.e., thefunction can take on a potentially very large number of discrete values.This function will be roughly constant when the category, topic does notchange and change to another constant value when the category, topicchanges at some time t. This change will, in general, be gradual withinthe interval of the window.

Segmenting the media stream into time-continuous media items withdistinct category, topic is now an issue of detecting changes in thevalue of C(t), as described in this patent application. There are amultitude of applications of this invention when the target media streamis segmented into separate media item. An application, for instance, ismonitoring a given television for the occurrence of instances of apre-specified set of media items. Such broadcast monitoring can be usedto detect any type of pre-produced media material. The more typical useis for verifying the broadcasting of TV commercial messages(advertisements). Advertisers (companies whose products are beingadvertised) require an independent verification of the actualbroadcasting of the commercial in order to make payments to thebroadcaster. This process currently relies on a human viewer samplingthe channel to verify the airing of a commercial. Hence, it is a laborintensive and error prone process.

The media element similarity measurement process described in thisinvention that combines textual and visual features can be used to servethe function of the human viewer. The commercial messages to bemonitored is a set reference media items S. As described in thisinvention, these reference media element are used to generate a featurevector. To monitor a given channel, Channel X, (a target media stream)for commercials, a computing system that houses the classifier describedin this invention is used. Depending on the type of broadcast (NationalTelevision System Committee (NTSC), Phase Alternating Line (PAL),digital, analog/digital audio), the media element (tuned to Channel X),visual, speech and captioning, is decoded and input to the computingsystem.

The media element classifier operates on the target media stream andproduces a report. This report, in the case of commercial monitoring,will include the title of the commercial detected (reference media itemidentifier), the date and approximate time at which the commercialstarted, the date and approximate time at which the commercial ended andsome type of classification quality, e.g., some similarity measurebetween reference media item and a segment of the target media stream,hence, a similarity measure between the combined feature vector of thetarget media segment and the combined feature vector of the referencemedia item.

An application of the present invention targeted towards the task ofvideo indexing is video event detection. Video indexing can be definedas the operation of designating video items (media items) with certainpredefined labels. There exists a significant body of prior art on thesubject of video indexing. For example, consider a video of a soccergame, indexing this video will result in annotation table that looks asfollows:

Event Number ~ Begin Time ~ End Time Label 1 00:00:10:12 00:00:12:10Penalty Kick 2 00:20:12:10 00:20:13:10 Field Goal 3 00:33:12:0900:35:12:10 Penalty Corner 4 . . . . . . . . .

There are several approaches to generating such reports, using softwarealgorithms, described in the prior art. One of the approaches to eventdetection has been disclosed in R. Mohan. This approach uses referencevideo segments (examples of how a typical event would look like) andcompares the target stream to the reference video segment based ongenerating codes for both the reference segment and the target segment.The discussion provided by Mohan however does not address the problem ofperforming such similarity measurements between a target stream and amultiplicity (large number) of reference streams, nor does it addressincluding the textual information. Essentially, the target stream issimultaneously compared to the reference segments in a sequentialfashion, one reference segment at a time, only using visual information.This inherently limits the number of reference segments that can be usedin the comparisons.

The classification methods discussed in this invention can be applied tothe video event detection problem as follows. The multiple examplevideos (media items) for the events to be detected are selected. Thesevideos form the reference media streams S. The reference media streamsare used to compute reference feature vectors.

The search engine described in this invention is deployed using thesereference feature vectors. The target media stream (the video to beannotated) is fed to the appropriate decoder and the classificationengine operates on the target media stream to generate the report. Thisreport is a tabulation of the events in the target stream as shown inthe table above.

This event detection is not limited to off-line video annotation, butalso can be performed in real-time. Applications are in the arena ofmonitoring and human machine interaction. Events, such as, dangeroussituations, human gestures combined with spoken command, etc. Can bedetected in real time by employing the classification engine describedin this invention with an appropriate feature vectors.

Another use of this invention is the categorization of multimedia email.Today, the content of email consists of text, possibly with attachments,or it consists of an html—hypertext markup language—file, which isitself text, possibly with references to other files or data objectsthat may provide non-textual data to be used by a browser when the htmlfile is displayed. In the future, we envision email whose content isprimarily a video message, possibly embedded in or accompanying a textfile (e.g., an html file) used to control the display of the videomessage.

Such video email may well be created in a scenario such as thefollowing, in which we assume the computer belonging to the user—herebeing Sam Sender—is equipped with speakers, a video camera trained onthe user, and voice recognition software. Sam Sender wishes to send amessage to Richard Receiver, a customer service representative at theMessage Receiver Corp. Assuming that Sam Sender has named his computerSybil, Sam says or signals, “Sybil, send a message to Richard Receiverat MessageReceiverCorp.com, with caption: ‘Complaint about billingerror.’” The computer identifies the email address of the recipient,detects that the intended text caption for the message is “Complaintabout billing error,” prepares to store the video and sound componentsof the message in a file, turns on the camera, and then says to Sam“Ready to record message.” The Sam recites his message using colorfullanguage, while gesticulating and making faces. All of this is recordedby the computer. Sam finishes by saying or signaling “Sybil, sendmessage.” The computer would then create a file containing the captionto be displayed, the video (including sound) that was recorded, theaddress of the sender, and any other information needed to enable theultimate display of the captioned video by Richard Receiver's computer.

The classifiers induced by the method of this invention, if trained withappropriate training data, could be used to classify such video email.

For instance, in the scenario above, the mail server at the MessageReceiver Corp. might apply a classifier to categorize the message as onethat should be handled by Bill Bungler in the billing department,consequently sending a copy of the message directly to Bill Bungler inorder to expedite resolution of the problem, while also sending a noteto Richard Receiver informing him of this.

The following figures give a further depiction and description of theabove described uses of the invention. They are provided as explanationof the business applications of the invention.

FIG. 23 is a business method for determining profiles of thosemultimedia item categories of particular interest to various differentusers retrieving multimedia content from private and/or public networks.Here a private and/or public network 2300, contains multimedia items inmultiple ways. The multimedia items URL 1 (2303), . . . , URL 2 (2306),. . . , URL N (2309) each could a be a Web page that is indexed by aUniversal Resource Locator (URL). The multimedia items can also bedatabases containing multimedia content, i.e., Database 1 (2304), . . ., Database M (2308). From Web pages and these databases, the multimediamay be retrieved and viewed by the users through any means (e.g.,FTP—file transfer protocol). The users, 2341, 2343, 2345, . . . , i.e.,, User i, i=1, . . . , m, retrieving multimedia documents 2303, 2306, .. . and 2304, 2308 . . . , do so through the clients 2342, 2344, 2346, .. . . These clients retrieve the multimedia items from one or moreservers (not shown) at which the multimedia items reside. The clientscan be thin with little compute power and storage available, but, ingeneral, can be a computing device of any size. The clients 2342, 2344,. . . , and 2346 are connected to the servers through communicationlinks 2353, 2356, . . . , and 2359, respectively. These links can bewireless (e.g., wireless Ethernet, BlueTooth) or hardwired.

The communication links 2353, 2356, . . . , and 2359 can be eitherovertly or covertly monitored, by processes which are indicated with thecircular shapes, 2363, 2366 through 2369. As part of these processes,the intercepted multimedia items can be categorized in terms ofcategory, subject, topic, object, etc. For each individual user, aprofile, profiles 2372, 2376, . . . , 2379, i.e., Profiles j, j=1, . . ., m, are generated by building an textual-visual feature vector F fromthe intercepted multimedia. The profiles can be simply a set of suchvectors, F_(i), i=0, . . . , n. These vectors can also be used to learnthe preferences and dislikes of a user, users 2341, 2343, 2345. Such adescription of the user is stored in profiles 2373, 2376, 2379, . . . .Applications of such profiles are direct marketing, user-profile-definedpush news, news alerts. For instance, a cable company could learn theuser profiles and recommend programs based on the user profile toindividual viewers. Similar function can be built into set top boxes.

FIG. 24A depicts a business application of the multimedia itemcategorizer subject of this invention for building index tables toorganize a multimedia item database in terms of categories or indices.The database 2400 contains multimedia items, m=1, . . . , M, 2401, 2402,2403, . . . , 2406, . . . , 2409. Each multimedia item is of unknowncategory, subject, object or topic. There may also be global parametricdata associated with these multimedia items. Process 2415, is the seriesof computational step to determine a visual and textual feature vector,F=F_(v)+F_(t) 2416 for all multimedia items. These feature vectors areinput to categorizer 2420 (a categorizer as described in FIGS. 6A and6B).

For each multimedia item m (2406) in database 2400 a pair (item i, {catj, cat k, cat l, . . . }) as 2425 is determined. These pairs 2422 areindicated by arrows 2427, where the examples are (item n, {cat 2}),(item i, {cat j}) 2426, (item m, {cat 3, 6}) 2429 and (item 3, {cat N})2428. Each of these pairs contains an item, indicated by item i in 2425,and a set of categories indicated by the set {cat j, cat k, cat l, . . .}. Hence, every item in the multimedia database is annotated by aseries, or set, of categories that the particular item belongs to. Thesepairs (item i, {cat j, cat k, cat l, . . . }) are used to populate thehash table 2410.

This table 2410, has a number of N indices 2412 and an associated numberof N entries 2414. The indices 2412, cat 1, . . . , cat i, . . . , cat Nare associated with the N possible categories that are (expected to be)found in the database. Here these categories can be learned or can be apredetermined set of categories. The entries 2414, e.g., 2415, 2416,2417, 2418, 2419, contain the item numbers that are associated with thecorresponding categories in the indices 2412 as is determined bycategorizer 2420. Hence, 2427 (item n, {cat 2}) is placed in index Cat 2with corresponding entry 2416 containing the item number n. Note thateach entry can contain multiple item numbers, indicated by entry 2416 {j. . . } This simply means that all these items {j . . . } arecategorized as the corresponding category number in the index 2412associated with entry 2416. Of course, an item can also be classifiedinto multiple categories, indicated by arrows 2428 {item m, {cat x, y})and 2429 {item m, {cat x, y}). Table 2410 can now be used to retrievemultimedia items of a certain category. For example, to find items ofcategory i the corresponding item numbers is given in list or set {j . .. } as in 2417. That is, the set of multimedia items contains item j.The next figure further explains this process.

FIG. 24B is a business application for retrieving of multimedia itemsfrom database 2400 based on the database organization and databaseindexing described in FIG. 24A. Here is again shown the multimediadatabase 2400 containing multimedia items, m=1, . . . , M, 2401, 1402,2403, . . . , 2406, . . . , 2409. The populated hash table 2410 fromFIG. 24B, contains (index, entry) pairs such as 2429 {item m, {cat x,y})., indicating that item m and 6 belongs to categories x and y. Hence,the search for multimedia items of (say) category Cat i, simply isperformed by indexing into index entry pair, (Cat i, {j . . . }) 2417 oftable 2410. The list {j . . . } or set {j . . . } in the correspondingentry of index 2417 are the multimedia items that are of category Cat i.The entries 2414 contain pointers 2460, 2462, 2464, 2466, . . . , 2468to the multimedia items 2401, . . . , 2409 in database 2400.

FIG. 25 is a business application and system 2500 where one or more ofmultimedia items are received and the items are routed according to themultimedia items category. The systems takes as input any multimediaitem 2510. This item may contain streaming multimedia and this could bea streaming multimedia item of different categories in different timesegments of the stream. This multimedia item is input 2515 to thecategorizer 2520. An incarnation of categorizer 2520 is, for example,shown in FIG. 18. Switch 2530 is a router that can direct the multimediaitem 2510 to various destinations, Destination 1 (2550), Destination 2(2560), through 2570, Destination N (2590). Switch 2530 is differentfrom an ordinary switch in that the multimedia item 2510 can be routedto one or more destinations 2540 at the same time. An example in FIG. 25is given by extra switch position 2538 in addition to 2535. Herewith,multimedia item 2510 is sent to Destination 2 (2560) but also to someother destination Destination n, with n determined by 2538.

A use of system 2500 is, for example, the categorization of incomingmultimedia e-mail and the determination what the correct procedure forhandling each particular incoming e-mail is. The incoming e-mail can berouted to a sender, a folder, a person, a personal folder, a corporatefolder, and a corporate department. The multimedia e-mail may also beduplicated before being routed.

FIG. 26 is a business application 2600 where one or more multimediaitems 2610 are received and for each item some decision 2690 based onthe category of the multimedia item is made. This system is broader thanthe system described in FIG. 25, in that the business decision 2690 doesnot need to be a decision to route the multimedia item to certainphysical or logical places. The systems takes as input one or moremultimedia items 2610. These items may contain streaming multimedia andcould be a streaming multimedia item of different categories indifferent time segments of the stream. This multimedia item is input2615 to the categorizer 2560. The categorizer may, for instance, be asthe one shown in FIG. 18. The output 2625 of categorizer 2620 is inputto the decision process 2690. The multimedia items 2610 could be digitalmultimedia copies and the feature vectors computed by categorizer 2560could represent restricted multimedia items and the comparisondetermines if the digital multimedia copies are similar to restrictedmultimedia items and the decision is that the digital multimedia copiesare subject to a second restriction. This second restriction couldinclude any one or more of the following: a copyright restriction, atrademark restriction, intellectual property restriction, parentalguidance restriction, common decency restrictions, user-definedrestrictions.

FIG. 27 is a business application 2700 where one or more multimediaitems on a private and/or public network 2710 are examined and for eachfound multimedia item a decision based on the category of the multimediaitem is made. The private and/or public network 2710 contains an, inprinciple, very large number multimedia items. Examples of these itemsin FIG. 27 are the items labeled 2702, 2704 and 2706. These items can beaccessed and downloaded, if necessary, by process 2720. Process 2720 isthe combination of a crawler process 2730 and a down loader process2740. The crawler process 2730 is a process that finds the multimediaitems 2702, 2704, . . . , 2706 on the private and/or public network 2710The down loader process 2740, on the other hand, examines the multimediaitems 2702, 2704, . . . , 2706, and if multimedia content is found thatis suspicious according to a set of predefined rules which can contain acategorizer as 2780. If the content is suspicious, the multimedia itemis downloaded and is input 2775 to the categorizer 2780. The categorizermay, for instance, be as the one shown in FIG. 18. The output 2785 ofcategorizer 2780 is input to the decision process 2790. The multimediaitems 2702, 2704, 2706 could be digital multimedia copies and thefeature vectors computed by categorizer 2780 could represent restrictedmultimedia items and the comparison determines if the digital multimediacopies are similar to the restricted multimedia items and the decisionis that the digital multimedia copies are subject to a secondrestriction. This second restriction includes any one or more of thefollowing: a copyright restriction, a trademark restriction,intellectual property restriction, parental guidance restriction, commondecency restrictions, user-defined restrictions.

1. A business method comprising the steps of: monitoring one or moremultimedia items accessed by a user, each multimedia item having two ormore disparate modalities, the disparate modalities being at least oneor more visual modalities and one or more textual modalities; for eachof the one or more multimedia items: (a) creating a visual featurevector for each of the visual modalities and a textual feature vectorfor each of the textual modalities; and (b) concatenating the visualfeature vectors and the textual feature vectors into one or more unifiedfeature vectors; categorizing at least a portion of each of themultimedia items by categorizing respective ones of the unified featurevectors; and assembling a user profile based on the categorization.
 2. Abusiness method, as in claim 1, further comprising the step of: usingthe user profile to match one or more multimedia items stored in one ormore databases.
 3. A business method, as in claim 2, where one or moreof the databases are part of a computer that is connected to one or morenetworks.
 4. A business method, as in claim 3, where the networksinclude any one or more of the following: an Internet, an intranet, anextranet, a corporate network, a government network, a infrared network,and a radio frequency network.
 5. A business method, as in claim 1,where the categories include any one or more of the following: aproduct, a service, an interest, a retail item, a hobby, a food item, anitem of clothing, a travel package, a vacation destination, a financialproduct, a business partner, a business interest, a medical product, acommercial, and a social interest.
 6. A business method, as in claim 1,where the category includes any one or more of the following services:consulting, legal, real estate, medical, technical, physical training,diet, cosmetic, fashion, governmental, automotive, design, architecture,personal assistants, games, on-line games of chance, dating services,and landscaping.
 7. A business method comprising the steps of: scanningone or more multimedia items in a database, each multimedia item havingtwo or more disparate modalities, the disparate modalities being atleast one or more visual modalities and one or more textual modalities;for each of the one or more multimedia items: (a) creating a visualfeature vector for each of the visual modalities and a textual featurevector for each of the textual modalities; and (b) concatenating thevisual feature vectors and the textual feature vectors into one or moreunified feature vectors; categorizing at least a portion of each of themultimedia items by categorizing respective ones of the unified featurevectors; and creating one or more indices of the database based on thecategorization.
 8. A business method, as in claim 7, where the databaseresides on any one or more of the following: a network server, a website, a personal computer, a server farm, and a network disk array.
 9. Abusiness method, as in claim 7, further comprising the step of: making abusiness decision based on the classifications.
 10. A business method,as in claim 9, where the categorization is used to organize a collectionof the multimedia items into a database where the multimedia items areretrievable based on an annotation of the classification.
 11. A businessmethod, as in claim 10, where the multimedia items that are retrievedare used as a response to a query of a search engine.
 12. A businessmethod, as in claim 9, where the multimedia item is a multimedia e-mailand the multimedia e-mail is routed based on one or more of thecategories assigned to the multimedia e-mail.
 13. A business method, asin claim 12, where the multimedia e-mail is routed to any one or more ofthe following: a sender, a folder, a person, a personal folder, acorporate folder, and a corporate department.
 14. A business method, asin claim 13, where the multimedia e-mail is multiplied before beingrouted.
 15. A business method comprising the steps of: scanning one ormore multimedia items in a database, each multimedia item having two ormore disparate modalities, the disparate modalities being at least oneor more visual modalities and one or more textual modalities; for eachof the one or more multimedia items: (a) creating a visual featurevector for each of the visual modalities and a textual feature vectorfor each of the textual modalities; and (b) concatenating the visualfeature vectors and the textual feature vectors into one or more unifiedfeature vectors; categorizing at least a portion of each of themultimedia items by categorizing respective ones of the unified featurevectors; comparing one or more of the unified feature vectors to one ormore other feature vectors; and making a decision based on thecomparison.
 16. A business method, as in claim 15, where the multimediaitems are digital multimedia copies and the feature vectors representrestricted multimedia items and the comparison determines if the digitalmultimedia copies are similar to the restricted multimedia items and thedecision is that the digital multimedia copies are subject to a secondrestriction.
 17. A business method, as in claim 16, where the secondrestriction includes any one or more of the following: a copyrightrestriction, a trademark restriction, intellectual property restriction,parental guidance restriction, common decency restrictions, user-definedrestrictions.
 18. A business method, as in claim 16, where the digitalmultimedia copies are accessible over the Internet.
 19. A businessmethod, as in claim 15, where the comparison indicates a degree ofsimilarity and the decision is that the multimedia item contains a knowncontent.